On 20/02/2017 17:46, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 3:05 AM, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> >> On 18/02/2017 04:29, Andy Lutomirski wrote: >>> There's no code here because the patch is trivial, but I want to run >>> the idea by you all first to see if there are any issues. >>> >>> VMX is silly and forces the TSS limit to the minimum on VM exits. KVM >>> wastes lots of cycles bumping it back up to accomodate the io bitmap. >> >> Actually looked at the code now... >> >> reload_tss is only invoked for userspace exits, so it is a nice-to-have >> but it wouldn't show on most workloads. Still it does save 150-200 >> clock cycles to remove it (I just commented out reload_tss() from >> __vmx_load_host_state to test). > > That's for anything involving userspace or preemption, right? Yes. But 150-200 clock cycles are nothing compared to the cache misses you get from preemption, so I'd ignore that. Saving 300 clock cycles on userspace exits from TR+GSBASE would be about 5% on my Haswell. > That being said, vmx_save_host_state() is, um, poorly optimized. Yeah, but again it doesn't run that often in practical cases. Paolo
