VMWRITEs to the major VMCS controls, pin controls included, are
deceptively expensive. CPUs with VMCS caching (Westmere and later) also
optimize away consistency checks on VM-Entry, i.e. skip consistency
checks if the relevant fields have not changed since the last successful
VM-Entry (of the cached VMCS). Because uops are a precious commodity,
uCode's dirty VMCS field tracking isn't as precise as software would
prefer. Notably, writing any of the major VMCS fields effectively marks
the entire VMCS dirty, i.e. causes the next VM-Entry to perform all
consistency checks, which consumes several hundred cycles.
As it pertains to KVM, toggling PIN_BASED_VMX_PREEMPTION_TIMER more than
doubles the latency of the next VM-Entry (and again when/if the flag is
toggled back). In a non-nested scenario, running a "standard" guest
with the preemption timer enabled, toggling the timer flag is uncommon
but not rare, e.g. roughly 1 in 10 entries. Disabling the preemption
timer can change these numbers due to its use for "immediate exits",
even when explicitly disabled by userspace.
Nested virtualization in particular is painful, as the timer flag is set
for the majority of VM-Enters, but prepare_vmcs02() initializes vmcs02's
pin controls to *clear* the flag since its the timer's final state isn't
known until vmx_vcpu_run(). I.e. the majority of nested VM-Enters end
up unnecessarily writing pin controls *twice*.
Rather than toggle the timer flag in pin controls, set the timer value
itself to the largest allowed value to put it into a "soft disabled"
state, and ignore any spurious preemption timer exits.
Sadly, the timer is a 32-bit value and so theoretically it can fire
before the head death of the universe, i.e. spurious exits are possible.
But because KVM does *not* save the timer value on VM-Exit and because
the timer runs at a slower rate than the TSC, the maximuma timer value
is still sufficiently large for KVM's purposes. E.g. on a modern CPU
with a timer that runs at 1/32 the frequency of a 2.4ghz constant-rate
TSC, the timer will fire after ~55 seconds of *uninterrupted* guest
execution. In other words, spurious VM-Exits are effectively only
possible if the host is completely tickless on the logical CPU, the
guest is not using the preemption timer, and the guest is not generating
VM-Exits for any other reason.
To be safe from bad/weird hardware, disable the preemption timer if its
maximum delay is less than ten seconds. Ten seconds is mostly arbitrary
and was selected in no small part because it's a nice round number.
For simplicity and paranoia, fall back to __kvm_request_immediate_exit()
if the preemption timer is disabled by KVM or userspace. Previously
KVM continued to use the preemption timer to force immediate exits even
when the timer was disabled by userspace. Now that KVM leaves the timer
running instead of truly disabling it, allow userspace to kill it
entirely in the unlikely event the timer (or KVM) malfunctions.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
... now that it is fully redundant with the pin controls shadow.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
... to pave the way for not preserving the shadow copies across switches
between vmcs01 and vmcs02, and eventually to avoid VMWRITEs to vmcs02
when the desired value is unchanged across nested VM-Enters.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Generic x86 code invokes the kvm_x86_ops external interrupt handler on
all VM-Exits regardless of the actual exit type. Use the already-cached
EXIT_REASON to determine if the VM-Exit was due to an interrupt, thus
avoiding an extra VMREAD (to query VM_EXIT_INTR_INFO) for all other
types of VM-Exit.
In addition to avoiding the extra VMREAD, checking the EXIT_REASON
instead of VM_EXIT_INTR_INFO makes it more obvious that
vmx_handle_external_intr() is called for all VM-Exits, e.g. someone
unfamiliar with the flow might wonder under what condition(s)
VM_EXIT_INTR_INFO does not contain a valid interrupt, which is
simply not possible since KVM always runs with "ack interrupt on exit".
WARN once if VM_EXIT_INTR_INFO doesn't contain a valid interrupt on
an EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT VM-Exit, as such a condition would indicate a
hardware bug.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Currently, host_rsp is cached on a per-vCPU basis, i.e. it's stored in
struct vcpu_vmx. In non-nested usage the caching is for all intents
and purposes 100% effective, e.g. only the first VMLAUNCH needs to
synchronize VMCS.HOST_RSP since the call stack to vmx_vcpu_run() is
identical each and every time. But when running a nested guest, KVM
must invalidate the cache when switching the current VMCS as it can't
guarantee the new VMCS has the same HOST_RSP as the previous VMCS. In
other words, the cache loses almost all of its efficacy when running a
nested VM.
Move host_rsp to struct vmcs_host_state, which is per-VMCS, so that it
is cached on a per-VMCS basis and restores its 100% hit rate when
nested VMs are in play.
Note that the host_rsp cache for vmcs02 essentially "breaks" when
nested early checks are enabled as nested_vmx_check_vmentry_hw() will
see a different RSP at the time of its VM-Enter. While it's possible
to avoid even that VMCS.HOST_RSP synchronization, e.g. by employing a
dedicated VM-Exit stack, there is little motivation for doing so as
the overhead of two VMWRITEs (~55 cycles) is dwarfed by the overhead
of the extra VMX transition (600+ cycles) and is a proverbial drop in
the ocean relative to the total cost of a nested transtion (10s of
thousands of cycles).
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Jim Mattson <jmattson@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
The header, evmcs.h, already exists and contains a fair amount of code,
but there are a few pieces in vmx.c that can be moved verbatim. In
addition, move an array definition to evmcs.c to prepare for multiple
consumers of evmcs.h.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
vmcs12 is the KVM-defined struct used to track a nested VMCS, e.g. a
VMCS created by L1 for L2.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
This isn't intended to be a pure reflection of hardware, e.g. struct
loaded_vmcs and struct vmcs_host_state are KVM-defined constructs.
Similar to capabilities.h, this is a standalone file to avoid circular
dependencies between yet-to-be-created vmx.h and nested.h files.
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
