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All low-level memory operations go through Xen.
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Guest OSes are responsible for allocating and initializing PTs for processes (restricted to read only access)
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allocates and initialize a page and register it with Xen to serve as the new PT
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Direct page writes are intercepted, validated and applied by the Xen VMM
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update can be batched into a single hypercall (reduce cost of entering/exiting Xen)
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page_info struct associated with each machine page frame
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page type (none, l1, l2, l3, l4, LDT, GDT, RW)
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reference count – number of references to the page
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page frame can be reused only when unpinned and its reference count is zero
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Each domain has a maximum and current memory allocation
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max allocation is set at domain creation time and cannot be modified
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PT updates
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hypercall –> mmu_update()
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writable page tables –> vm_assist()
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Xen exists in the top 64MB (0xFC000000 – 0xFFFFFFFF) section of every guest virtual address space (TLB flush avoided when entering/leaving the hypervisor)
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not accessible or remappable by guest OSes.
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“fast handler” for system calls - direct access from app into guest OS, without going through Xen
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muse execute outside Ring 0
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Each guest supports a “ballon” memory management driver - that is used by the VMM to dynamically adjust the guest’s memory usage
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Page fault handling
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faulting address is written into an extended stack frame on the guest OS stack (normally the faulting address is read from a privileged processor register (CR2))
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In terms of page protection, Ring1/2 are considered to be part of ‘supervisor mode’. The WP bit in CR0 controls whether read-only restrictions are respected in supervisor mode – if the bit is clear then any mapped page is writable. Xen gets around this by always setting the WP bit and disallowing updates to it. xen/arch/x86/boot/x86_32.S#153
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Xen provides a domain with a list of machine frames during bootstrapping, and it is the domain’s responsibility to create the pseudo-physical address space from this
No guarantee that a domain will receive a contiguous stretch of physical memory. Most OSes do not have good support for operating in a fragmented physical address space.
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Machine memory
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entire amount of memory installed in the machine (physical memory)
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4kB machine page frames numbered consecutively starting from 0.
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Pseudo-physical memory
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per-domain abstraction.
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allows a guest OS to consider its memory allocation to consist of a contiguous range of physical page frames starting at physical frame 0.
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machine-to-physical table
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globally readable table maintained by Xen
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records the mapping from machine addresses to pseudo-physical addresses
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table size is proportional to the amount of RAM installed in the machine
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physical-to-machine table
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per-domain table which performs the inverse (physical-to-machine) mapping.
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table size is proportional to the memory allocation of the given domain.
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(XEN) VIRTUAL MEMORY ARRANGEMENT (for DOM0)
(XEN) Loaded kernel: c0100000→c042e254
(XEN) Init. ramdisk: c042f000→c07fca00
(XEN) Phys-Mach map: c07fd000→c086e894 == 454 MB (as can be verified by: xm list)
(XEN) Start info: c086f000→c0870000
(XEN) Page tables: c0870000→c0874000 == 16 MB
(XEN) Boot stack: c0874000→c0875000
(XEN) TOTAL: c0000000→c0c00000
(XEN) ENTRY ADDRESS: c0100000
x86-32 Xen supports only guests with 2-level page tables. PGD = l2, PTE =l1
How to intercept interrupts from guest domains
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-09/msg00597.html
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-09/msg00604.html
Page fault handling for Xen guests
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-02/msg00263.html
show pagetable walk if guest cannot handle page
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-09/msg00612.html
Memory management, mapping, paging questions...
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-10/msg01151.html
Information related to shadowing
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg00319.html
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg00793.html
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg00802.html
How to intercept memory operation in Xen
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg00659.html
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg00664.html
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg00717.html
alert message from dom0 to domU
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-12/msg00967.html
Share Memory Between DomainU and Domain0
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-12/msg01008.html
Call hypercall straightly from user space
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-12/msg01061.html
xen/arch/x86/traps.c#do_page_fault –> fixup_page_fault –> mm.c#ptwr_do_page_fault
xen-3.0.2-2/xen/arch/x86/setup.c#__start_xen()
| /
v /
xen-3.0.2-2/xen/common/domain.c#domain_create() /
| /
v /
xen-3.0.2-2/xen/arch/x86/domain.c#arch_domain_create() /
/
v
xen-3.0.2-2/xen/arch/x86/domain_build.c#construct_dom0()
Xen-ELF image vmlinux-syms-2.6.16-xen has a special'__xen_guest' section
Xen hypercall table:
/xen-3.0.2-2/xen/arch/x86/x86_32/entry.S
#I think this is called when DOM0 attempts to create a DOMU
xen-3.0.2-2/xen/common/dom0_ops.c#do_dom0_op()
trousers-0.2.7/src/tspi/spi_tpm.c#Tspi_TPM_Quote()
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v
trousers-0.2.7/src/tcsd_api/calltcsapi.c#TCSP_Quote()
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v
trousers-0.2.7/src/tcsd_api/tcstp.c#TCSP_Quote_TP()
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v
trousers-0.2.7/src/tcsd_api/tcstp.c#sendTCSDPacket()