On book3e, KVM uses load external pid (lwepx) dedicated instruction to read
guest last instruction on the exit path. lwepx exceptions (DTLB_MISS, DSI
and LRAT), generated by loading a guest address, needs to be handled by KVM.
These exceptions are generated in a substituted guest translation context
(EPLC[EGS] = 1) from host context (MSR[GS] = 0).
Currently, KVM hooks only interrupts generated from guest context (MSR[GS] = 1),
doing minimal checks on the fast path to avoid host performance degradation.
lwepx exceptions originate from host state (MSR[GS] = 0) which implies
additional checks in DO_KVM macro (beside the current MSR[GS] = 1) by looking
at the Exception Syndrome Register (ESR[EPID]) and the External PID Load Context
Register (EPLC[EGS]). Doing this on each Data TLB miss exception is obvious
too intrusive for the host.
Read guest last instruction from kvmppc_load_last_inst() by searching for the
physical address and kmap it. This address the TODO for TLB eviction and
execute-but-not-read entries, and allow us to get rid of lwepx until we are
able to handle failures.
A simple stress benchmark shows a 1% sys performance degradation compared with
previous approach (lwepx without failure handling):
time for i in `seq 1 10000`; do /bin/echo > /dev/null; done
real 0m 8.85s
user 0m 4.34s
sys 0m 4.48s
vs
real 0m 8.84s
user 0m 4.36s
sys 0m 4.44s
A solution to use lwepx and to handle its exceptions in KVM would be to temporary
highjack the interrupt vector from host. This imposes additional synchronizations
for cores like FSL e6500 that shares host IVOR registers between hardware threads.
This optimized solution can be later developed on top of this patch.
Signed-off-by: Mihai Caraman <mihai.caraman@freescale.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
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