Avi Kivity wrote:
Hollis Blanchard wrote:
I haven't been following this conversation at all. With that in mind...
AFAICS, a hypercall is clearly the higher-performing option, since you
don't need the additional memory load (which could even cause a page
fault in some circumstances) and instruction decode. That said, I'm
willing to agree that this overhead is probably negligible compared to
the IOp itself... Ahmdal's Law again.
It's a question of cost vs. benefit. It's clear the benefit is low
(but that doesn't mean it's not worth having). The cost initially
appeared to be very low, until the nested virtualization wrench was
thrown into the works. Not that nested virtualization is a reality --
even on svm where it is implemented it is not yet production quality
and is disabled by default.
Now nested virtualization is beginning to look interesting, with
Windows 7's XP mode requiring virtualization extensions. Desktop
virtualization is also something likely to use device assignment
(though you probably won't assign a virtio device to the XP instance
inside Windows 7).
Maybe we should revisit the mmio hypercall idea again, it might be
workable if we find a way to let the guest know if it should use the
hypercall or not for a given memory range.
mmio hypercall is nice because
- it falls back nicely to pure mmio
- it optimizes an existing slow path, not just new device models
- it has preexisting semantics, so we have less ABI to screw up
- for nested virtualization + device assignment, we can drop it and
get a nice speed win (or rather, less speed loss)
If it's a PCI device, then we can also have an interrupt which we
currently lack with vmcall-based hypercalls. This would give us
guestcalls, upcalls, or whatever we've previously decided to call them.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
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