To minimize the latency of timer interrupts as observed by the guest,
KVM adjusts the values it programs into the host timers to account for
the host's overhead of programming and handling the timer event. Now
that the timer advancement is automatically tuned during runtime, it's
effectively unbounded by default, e.g. if KVM is running as L1 the
advancement can measure in hundreds of milliseconds.
Disable timer advancement if adaptive tuning yields an advancement of
more than 5000ns, as large advancements can break reasonable assumptions
of the guest, e.g. that a timer configured to fire after 1ms won't
arrive on the next instruction. Although KVM busy waits to mitigate the
case of a timer event arriving too early, complications can arise when
shifting the interrupt too far, e.g. kvm-unit-test's vmx.interrupt test
will fail when its "host" exits on interrupts as KVM may inject the INTR
before the guest executes STI+HLT. Arguably the unit test is "broken"
in the sense that delaying a timer interrupt by 1ms doesn't technically
guarantee the interrupt will arrive after STI+HLT, but it's a reasonable
assumption that KVM should support.
Furthermore, an unbounded advancement also effectively unbounds the time
spent busy waiting, e.g. if the guest programs a timer with a very large
delay.
5000ns is a somewhat arbitrary threshold. When running on bare metal,
which is the intended use case, timer advancement is expected to be in
the general vicinity of 1000ns. 5000ns is high enough that false
positives are unlikely, while not being so high as to negatively affect
the host's performance/stability.
Note, a future patch will enable userspace to disable KVM's adaptive
tuning, which will allow priveleged userspace will to specifying an
advancement value in excess of this arbitrary threshold in order to
satisfy an abnormal use case.
Cc: Liran Alon <liran.alon@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Fixes: 3b8a5df6c4dc6 ("KVM: LAPIC: Tune lapic_timer_advance_ns automatically")
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@xxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c | 4 ++++
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c b/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c
index 4e000712cb82..d19c4b955e93 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c
@@ -1522,6 +1522,10 @@ void wait_lapic_expire(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu)
}
if (abs(guest_tsc - tsc_deadline) < LAPIC_TIMER_ADVANCE_ADJUST_DONE)
lapic_timer_advance_adjust_done = true;
+ if (unlikely(lapic_timer_advance_ns > 5000)) {
+ lapic_timer_advance_ns = 0;
+ lapic_timer_advance_adjust_done = true;
+ }
}
}
--
2.21.0
