xen/balloon: add runtime control for scrubbing ballooned out pages

Scrubbing pages on initial balloon down can take some time, especially
in nested virtualization case (nested EPT is slow). When HVM/PVH guest is
started with memory= significantly lower than maxmem=, all the extra
pages will be scrubbed before returning to Xen. But since most of them
weren't used at all at that point, Xen needs to populate them first
(from populate-on-demand pool). In nested virt case (Xen inside KVM)
this slows down the guest boot by 15-30s with just 1.5GB needed to be
returned to Xen.

Add runtime parameter to enable/disable it, to allow initially disabling
scrubbing, then enable it back during boot (for example in initramfs).
Such usage relies on assumption that a) most pages ballooned out during
initial boot weren't used at all, and b) even if they were, very few
secrets are in the guest at that time (before any serious userspace
kicks in).
Convert CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES to CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES_DEFAULT (also
enabled by default), controlling default value for the new runtime
switch.

Signed-off-by: Marek Marczykowski-Górecki <marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com>
Reviewed-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/include/xen/mem-reservation.h b/include/xen/mem-reservation.h
index 80b52b4945e9..a2ab516fcd2c 100644
--- a/include/xen/mem-reservation.h
+++ b/include/xen/mem-reservation.h
@@ -17,11 +17,12 @@
 
 #include <xen/page.h>
 
+extern bool xen_scrub_pages;
+
 static inline void xenmem_reservation_scrub_page(struct page *page)
 {
-#ifdef CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES
-	clear_highpage(page);
-#endif
+	if (xen_scrub_pages)
+		clear_highpage(page);
 }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_XEN_HAVE_PVMMU