An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what's dubbed the "KVM Chainsaw" as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu "god data structure". Red Hat engineer and KVM maintainer Paolo Bonzini has merged the kvm-chainsaw branch to KVM's "next" Git branch. With this KVM Chainsaw work now in the next branch, it should be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle. The KVM Chainsaw work deals with the kvm_mmu structure being overloaded with multiple uses and splits it down into three parts for better handling current KVM usage. Paolo explains of KVM Chainsaw with the merge to the KVM.git next branch: "The kvm_mmu is a "god data structure" that includes three different tasks: describing the guest page table's format, walking the guest page tables and building the page tables. This means that the (already poorly named) nested_mmu is only used in part, since it has no page tables to construct. Furthermore, some parts are reused across guest and host page tables (such as the reserved bits detector) but others are not; for example permission_fault is replaced by simplified code such as is_executable_pte(). This series cleans this up by splitting kvm_mmu in three parts...Read more of this story at Slashdot.