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>
This commit is contained in:
Michael S. Tsirkin
2017-04-21 12:27:17 +02:00
committed by Paolo Bonzini
parent db2336a804
commit 668fffa3f8
6 changed files with 58 additions and 4 deletions

View File

@@ -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).