Mark Langsdorf 565d0998ec KVM: SVM: Support Pause Filter in AMD processors ... New AMD processors (Family 0x10 models 8+) support the Pause Filter Feature. This feature creates a new field in the VMCB called Pause Filter Count. If Pause Filter Count is greater than 0 and intercepting PAUSEs is enabled, the processor will increment an internal counter when a PAUSE instruction occurs instead of intercepting. When the internal counter reaches the Pause Filter Count value, a PAUSE intercept will occur. This feature can be used to detect contended spinlocks, especially when the lock holding VCPU is not scheduled. Rescheduling another VCPU prevents the VCPU seeking the lock from wasting its quantum by spinning idly. Experimental results show that most spinlocks are held for less than 1000 PAUSE cycles or more than a few thousand. Default the Pause Filter Counter to 3000 to detect the contended spinlocks. Processor support for this feature is indicated by a CPUID bit. On a 24 core system running 4 guests each with 16 VCPUs, this patch improved overall performance of each guest's 32 job kernbench by approximately 3-5% when combined with a scheduler algorithm thati caused the VCPU to sleep for a brief period. Further performance improvement may be possible with a more sophisticated yield algorithm. Signed-off-by: Mark Langsdorf <mark.langsdorf@amd.com> Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>		2009-12-03 09:32:17 +02:00
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asm	KVM: SVM: Support Pause Filter in AMD processors	2009-12-03 09:32:17 +02:00