Hi,
Recently I'm playing around the Nvidia Xavier AGX board, which has VHE
extension support.
In theory, considering the CPU and memory, it should be pretty powerful
compared to boards like RPI CM4.
But to my surprise, KVM runs pretty poor on Xavier.
Just booting the edk2 firmware could take over 10s, and 20s to fully
boot the kernel.
Even my VM on RPI CM4 has way faster boot time, even just running on
PCIE2.0 x1 lane NVME, and just 4 2.1Ghz A72 core.
This is definitely out of my expectation, I double checked to be sure
that it's running in KVM mode.
But further digging shows that, since Xavier AGX CPU supports VHE, kvm
is running in VHE mode other than HYP mode on CM4.
Is there anyway to manually disable VHE mode to test the more common HYP
mode on Xavier?
BTW, this is the dmesg related to KVM on Xavier, running v5.13 upstream
kernel, with 64K page size:
[ 0.852357] kvm [1]: IPA Size Limit: 40 bits
[ 0.857378] kvm [1]: vgic interrupt IRQ9
[ 0.862122] kvm: pmu event creation failed -2
[ 0.866734] kvm [1]: VHE mode initialized successfully
While on CM4, the host runs v5.12.10 upstream kernel (with downstream
dtb), with 4K page size:
[ 1.276818] kvm [1]: IPA Size Limit: 44 bits
[ 1.278425] kvm [1]: vgic interrupt IRQ9
[ 1.278620] kvm [1]: Hyp mode initialized successfully
Could it be the PAGE size causing problem?
Thanks,
Qu
