KVM's current means of saving/restoring system counters is plagued with
temporal issues. On x86, we migrate the guest's system counter by-value
through the respective guest's IA32_TSC value. Restoring system counters
by-value is brittle as the state is not idempotent: the host system
counter is still oscillating between the attempted save and restore.
Furthermore, VMMs may wish to transparently live migrate guest VMs,
meaning that they include the elapsed time due to live migration blackout
in the guest system counter view. The VMM thread could be preempted for
any number of reasons (scheduler, L0 hypervisor under nested) between the
time that it calculates the desired guest counter value and when
KVM actually sets this counter state.
Despite the value-based interface that we present to userspace, KVM
actually has idempotent guest controls by way of the TSC offset.
We can avoid all of the issues associated with a value-based interface
by abstracting these offset controls in a new device attribute. This
series introduces new vCPU device attributes to provide userspace access
to the vCPU's system counter offset.
Patch 1 addresses a possible race in KVM_GET_CLOCK where
use_master_clock is read outside of the pvclock_gtod_sync_lock.
Patch 2 is a cleanup, moving the implementation of KVM_{GET,SET}_CLOCK
into helper methods.
Patch 3 adopts Paolo's suggestion, augmenting the KVM_{GET,SET}_CLOCK
ioctls to provide userspace with a (host_tsc, realtime) instant. This is
essential for a VMM to perform precise migration of the guest's system
counters.
Patches 4-5 are some preparatory changes for exposing the TSC offset to
userspace. Patch 6 provides a vCPU attribute to provide userspace access
to the TSC offset.
This series was tested with the new KVM selftests for the KVM clock and
system counter offset controls on Haswell hardware. Note that these
tests are mailed as a separate series due to the dependencies in both
x86 and arm64.
Applies cleanly to kvm/queue.
Parent commit: a3e0b8bd99ab ("KVM: MMU: change tracepoints arguments to kvm_page_fault")
v6: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210804085819.846610-1-oupton@xxxxxxxxxx
v6 -> v7:
- Separated x86, arm64, and selftests into different series
- Rebased on top of kvm/queue
Oliver Upton (6):
KVM: x86: Fix potential race in KVM_GET_CLOCK
KVM: x86: Create helper methods for KVM_{GET,SET}_CLOCK ioctls
KVM: x86: Report host tsc and realtime values in KVM_GET_CLOCK
KVM: x86: Take the pvclock sync lock behind the tsc_write_lock
KVM: x86: Refactor tsc synchronization code
KVM: x86: Expose TSC offset controls to userspace
Documentation/virt/kvm/api.rst | 42 ++-
Documentation/virt/kvm/devices/vcpu.rst | 57 ++++
Documentation/virt/kvm/locking.rst | 11 +
arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 4 +
arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm.h | 4 +
arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 362 +++++++++++++++++-------
include/uapi/linux/kvm.h | 7 +-
7 files changed, 378 insertions(+), 109 deletions(-)
--
2.33.0.rc1.237.g0d66db33f3-goog
