When we do stress test on KVM vPMU using Intel vtune, we find the following
warning kernel message in the guest VM:
[ 1437.487320] Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 20 on CPU 3.
[ 1437.487330] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
The Problem
===========
The above issue indicates that there are more NMIs injected than guest
could recognize. After a month of investigation, we discovered that the
bug happened due to minor glitches in two separate parts of the KVM: 1)
KVM vPMU mistakenly fires a PMI due to emulated counter overflow even
though the overflow has already been fired by the PMI handler on the
host [1]. 2) KVM APIC allows multiple injections of PMI at one VM entry
which violates Intel SDM. Both glitches contributes to extra injection
of PMIs and thus confuses PMI handler in guest VM and causes the above
warning messages.
The Fixes
=========
The patches disallow the multi-PMI injection fundamentally at APIC
level. In addition, they also simplify the PMI injection process by
removing irq_work and only use KVM_REQ_PMI.
The Testing
===========
With the series applied, we do not see the above warning messages when
stress testing VM with Intel vtune. In addition, we add some kernel
printing, all emulated counter overflow happens when hardware counter
value is 0 and emulated counter value is 1 (prev_counter is -1). We
never observed unexpected prev_counter values we saw in [2].
Note that this series does break the upstream kvm-unit-tests/pmu with the
following error:
FAIL: Intel: emulated instruction: instruction counter overflow
FAIL: Intel: full-width writes: emulated instruction: instruction counter overflow
This is a test bug and apply the following diff should fix the issue:
diff --git a/x86/pmu.c b/x86/pmu.c
index 0def2869..667e6233 100644
--- a/x86/pmu.c
+++ b/x86/pmu.c
@@ -68,6 +68,7 @@ volatile uint64_t irq_received;
static void cnt_overflow(isr_regs_t *regs)
{
»......irq_received++;
+»......apic_write(APIC_LVTPC, apic_read(APIC_LVTPC) & ~APIC_LVT_MASKED);
»......apic_write(APIC_EOI, 0);
}
We will post the above change soon.
[1] commit 9cd803d496e7 ("KVM: x86: Update vPMCs when retiring instructions")
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAL715WL9T8Ucnj_1AygwMgDjOJrttNZHRP9o-KUNfpx1aYZnog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Versioning
==========
The series is in v1. We made some changes:
- drop Dapeng's reviewed-by, since code changes.
- applies fix up in kvm_apic_local_deliver(). [seanjc]
- remove pmc->prev_counter. [seanjc]
Previous version (v0) shown as follows:
- [APIC patches v0]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230901185646.2823254-1-jmattson@xxxxxxxxxx/
- [vPMU patch v0]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/ZQ4A4KaSyygKHDUI@xxxxxxxxxx/
Jim Mattson (2):
KVM: x86: Synthesize at most one PMI per VM-exit
KVM: x86: Mask LVTPC when handling a PMI
arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 1 -
arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c | 8 ++++++--
arch/x86/kvm/pmu.c | 27 +--------------------------
arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 3 +++
4 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 29 deletions(-)
base-commit: 6de2ccc169683bf81feba163834dae7cdebdd826
--
2.42.0.515.g380fc7ccd1-goog
