Hi,

While we've been working on the rust-vmm virtio backends on Xen we obviously have to map guest memory info the userspace of the daemon. However following the logic of what is going on is a little confusing. For example in the Linux backend we have this:

void *osdep_xenforeignmemory_map(xenforeignmemory_handle *fmem, uint32_t dom, void *addr, int prot, int flags, size_t num, const xen_pfn_t arr[/*num*/], int err[/*num*/]) { int fd = fmem->fd; privcmd_mmapbatch_v2_t ioctlx; size_t i; int rc;

addr = mmap(addr, num << XC_PAGE_SHIFT, prot, flags | MAP_SHARED, fd, 0); if ( addr == MAP_FAILED ) return NULL;

ioctlx.num = num; ioctlx.dom = dom; ioctlx.addr = (unsigned long)addr; ioctlx.arr = arr; ioctlx.err = err;

rc = ioctl(fd, IOCTL_PRIVCMD_MMAPBATCH_V2, &ioctlx);

Where the fd passed down is associated with the /dev/xen/privcmd device for issuing hypercalls on userspaces behalf. What is confusing is why the function does it's own mmap - one would assume the passed addr would be associated with a anonymous or file backed mmap region already that the calling code has setup. Applying a mmap to a special device seems a little odd.

Looking at the implementation on the kernel side it seems the mmap handler only sets a few flags:

static int privcmd_mmap(struct file *file, struct vm_area_struct *vma) { /* DONTCOPY is essential for Xen because copy_page_range doesn't know * how to recreate these mappings */ vma->vm_flags |= VM_IO | VM_PFNMAP | VM_DONTCOPY | VM_DONTEXPAND | VM_DONTDUMP; vma->vm_ops = &privcmd_vm_ops; vma->vm_private_data = NULL;

return 0; }

So can I confirm that the mmap of /dev/xen/privcmd is being called for side effects? Is it so when the actual ioctl is called the correct flags are set of the pages associated with the user space virtual address range?

Can I confirm there shouldn't be any limitation on where and how the userspace virtual address space is setup for the mapping in the guest memory?

Is there a reason why this isn't done in the ioctl path itself?

I'm trying to understand the differences between Xen and KVM in the API choices here. I think the equivalent is the KVM_SET_USER_MEMORY_REGION ioctl for KVM which brings a section of the guest physical address space into the userspaces vaddr range.