The cpuidle-haltpoll driver allows the guest vcpus to poll for a specified
amount of time before halting. This provides the following benefits
to host side polling:
1) The POLL flag is set while polling is performed, which allows
a remote vCPU to avoid sending an IPI (and the associated
cost of handling the IPI) when performing a wakeup.
2) The HLT VM-exit cost can be avoided.
The downside of guest side polling is that polling is performed
even with other runnable tasks in the host.
Results comparing halt_poll_ns and server/client application
where a small packet is ping-ponged:
host --> 31.33
halt_poll_ns=300000 / no guest busy spin --> 33.40 (93.8%)
halt_poll_ns=0 / guest_halt_poll_ns=300000 --> 32.73 (95.7%)
For the SAP HANA benchmarks (where idle_spin is a parameter
of the previous version of the patch, results should be the
same):
hpns == halt_poll_ns
idle_spin=0/ idle_spin=800/ idle_spin=0/
hpns=200000 hpns=0 hpns=800000
DeleteC06T03 (100 thread) 1.76 1.71 (-3%) 1.78 (+1%)
InsertC16T02 (100 thread) 2.14 2.07 (-3%) 2.18 (+1.8%)
DeleteC00T01 (1 thread) 1.34 1.28 (-4.5%) 1.29 (-3.7%)
UpdateC00T03 (1 thread) 4.72 4.18 (-12%) 4.53 (-5%)
V2:
- Move from x86 to generic code (Paolo/Christian).
- Add auto-tuning logic (Paolo).
- Add MSR to disable host side polling (Paolo).
