On 6/23/2020 8:51 AM, Sean Christopherson wrote:
Remove support for context switching between the guest's and host's
desired UMWAIT_CONTROL. Propagating the guest's value to hardware isn't
required for correct functionality, e.g. KVM intercepts reads and writes
to the MSR, and the latency effects of the settings controlled by the
MSR are not architecturally visible.
As a general rule, KVM should not allow the guest to control power
management settings unless explicitly enabled by userspace, e.g. see
KVM_CAP_X86_DISABLE_EXITS. E.g. Intel's SDM explicitly states that C0.2
can improve the performance of SMT siblings. A devious guest could
disable C0.2 so as to improve the performance of their workloads at the
detriment to workloads running in the host or on other VMs.
Wholesale removal of UMWAIT_CONTROL context switching also fixes a race
condition where updates from the host may cause KVM to enter the guest
with the incorrect value. Because updates are are propagated to all
CPUs via IPI (SMP function callback), the value in hardware may be
stale with respect to the cached value and KVM could enter the guest
with the wrong value in hardware. As above, the guest can't observe the
bad value, but it's a weird and confusing wart in the implementation.
Removal also fixes the unnecessary usage of VMX's atomic load/store MSR
lists. Using the lists is only necessary for MSRs that are required for
correct functionality immediately upon VM-Enter/VM-Exit, e.g. EFER on
old hardware, or for MSRs that need to-the-uop precision, e.g. perf
related MSRs. For UMWAIT_CONTROL, the effects are only visible in the
kernel via TPAUSE/delay(), and KVM doesn't do any form of delay in
vcpu_vmx_run().
Using the atomic lists is undesirable as they are more
expensive than direct RDMSR/WRMSR.
Do you mean the extra handling of atomic list facility in kvm? Or just
mean vm-exit/-entry MSR-load/save in VMX hardware is expensive than
direct RDMSR/WRMSR instruction?
