diff options
| author | Michael S. Tsirkin | 2017-04-21 12:27:17 +0200 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Paolo Bonzini | 2017-04-21 12:50:28 +0200 |
| commit | 668fffa3f838edfcb1679f842f7ef1afa61c3e9a (patch) | |
| tree | edf2ba4b34dfc5f3757d20e94c598829bbb48e77 /Documentation/virtual | |
| parent | db2336a80489e7c3c7728cefd9be58fac5ecfb39 (diff) | |
kvm: better MWAIT emulation for guests
Guests that are heavy on futexes end up IPI'ing each other a lot. That
can lead to significant slowdowns and latency increase for those guests
when running within KVM.
If only a single guest is needed on a host, we have a lot of spare host
CPU time we can throw at the problem. Modern CPUs implement a feature
called "MWAIT" which allows guests to wake up sleeping remote CPUs without
an IPI - thus without an exit - at the expense of never going out of guest
context.
The decision whether this is something sensible to use should be up to the
VM admin, so to user space. We can however allow MWAIT execution on systems
that support it properly hardware wise.
This patch adds a CAP to user space and a KVM cpuid leaf to indicate
availability of native MWAIT execution. With that enabled, the worst a
guest can do is waste as many cycles as a "jmp ." would do, so it's not
a privilege problem.
We consciously do *not* expose the feature in our CPUID bitmap, as most
people will want to benefit from sleeping vCPUs to allow for over commit.
Reported-by: "Gabriel L. Somlo" <gsomlo@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
[agraf: fix amd, change commit message]
Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/virtual')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt | 9 |
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt index e60be91d8036..dc674c2b8b31 100644 --- a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt +++ b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt @@ -4111,3 +4111,12 @@ reserved. 2: MIPS64 or microMIPS64 with access to all address segments. Both registers and addresses are 64-bits wide. It will be possible to run 64-bit or 32-bit guest code. + +8.8 KVM_CAP_X86_GUEST_MWAIT + +Architectures: x86 + +This capability indicates that guest using memory monotoring instructions +(MWAIT/MWAITX) to stop the virtual CPU will not cause a VM exit. As such time +spent while virtual CPU is halted in this way will then be accounted for as +guest running time on the host (as opposed to e.g. HLT). |