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Introduce movable pages for Hyper-V guests

From:  Stanislav Kinsburskii <skinsburskii-AT-linux.microsoft.com>
To:  kys-AT-microsoft.com, haiyangz-AT-microsoft.com, wei.liu-AT-kernel.org, decui-AT-microsoft.com
Subject:  [PATCH 0/3] Introduce movable pages for Hyper-V guests
Date:  Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:30:56 +0000
Message-ID:  <175874669044.157998.15064894246017794777.stgit@skinsburskii-cloud-desktop.internal.cloudapp.net>
Cc:  linux-hyperv-AT-vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org
Archive-link:  Article

From the start, the root-partition driver allocates, pins, and maps all
guest memory into the hypervisor at guest creation. This is simple: Linux
cannot move the pages, so the guest’s view in Linux and in Microsoft
Hypervisor never diverges.

However, this approach has major drawbacks:
- NUMA: affinity can’t be changed at runtime, so you can’t migrate guest memory closer to the CPUs running it → performance hit.
- Memory management: unused guest memory can’t be swapped out, compacted, or merged.
- Provisioning time: upfront allocation/pinning slows guest create/destroy.
- Overcommit: no memory overcommit on hosts with pinned-guest memory.

This series adds movable memory pages for Hyper-V child partitions. Guest
pages are no longer allocated upfront; they’re allocated and mapped into
the hypervisor on demand (i.e., when the guest touches a GFN that isn’t yet
backed by a host PFN).
When a page is moved, Linux no longer holds it and it is unmapped from the hypervisor.
As a result, Hyper-V guests behave like regular Linux processes, enabling standard Linux memory features to apply to guests.

Exceptions (still pinned):
  1. Encrypted guests (explicit).
  2 Guests with passthrough devices (implicitly pinned by the VFIO framework).

---

Stanislav Kinsburskii (3):
      Drivers: hv: Rename a few memory region related functions for clarity
      Drivers: hv: Centralize guest memory region destruction in helper
      Drivers: hv: Add support for movable memory regions


 drivers/hv/Kconfig          |    1 
 drivers/hv/mshv_root.h      |    8 +
 drivers/hv/mshv_root_main.c |  448 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
 3 files changed, 397 insertions(+), 60 deletions(-)




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