Hi,
(2010/07/13 11:25), Zachary Amsden wrote:
+
+2.3) APIC
+
+On Pentium and later processors, an on-board timer is available to each CPU
+as part of the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. The APIC is
+accessed through memory-mapped registers and provides interrupt service to each
+CPU, used for IPIs and local timer interrupts.
+
+Although in theory the APIC is a safe and stable source for local interrupts,
+in practice, many bugs and glitches have occurred due to the special nature of
+the APIC CPU-local memory-mapped hardware. Beware that CPU errata may affect
+the use of the APIC and that workarounds may be required. In addition, some of
+these workarounds pose unique constraints for virtualization - requiring either
+extra overhead incurred from extra reads of memory-mapped I/O or additional
+functionality that may be more computationally expensive to implement.
+
+Since the APIC is documented quite well in the Intel and AMD manuals, we will
+avoid repititon of the detail here. It should be pointed out that the APIC
repetition?
+timer is programmed through the LVT (local vector timer) register, is capable
+of one-shot or periodic operation, and is based on the bus clock divided down
+by the programmable divider register.
+
+2.4) HPET
+
+HPET is quite complex, and was originally intended to replace the PIT / RTC
+support of the X86 PC. It remains to be seen whether that will be the case, as
+the de facto standard of PC hardware is to emulate these older devices. Some
+systems designated as legacy free may support only the HPET as a hardware timer
+device.
+
+The HPET spec is rather loose and vague, requiring at least 3 hardware timers,
+but allowing implementation freedom to support many more. It also imposes no
+fixed rate on the timer frequency, but does impose some extremal values on
+frequency, error and slew.
+
+In general, the HPET is recommended as a high precision (compared to PIT /RTC)
+time source which is independent of local variation (as there is only one HPET
+in any given system). The HPET is also memory-mapped, and its presence is
+indicated through ACPI tables by the BIOS.
+
+Detailed specification of the HPET is beyond the current scope of this
+document, as it is also very well documented elsewhere.
+
+3.6) TSC and STPCLK / T-states
+
+External signals given to the processor may also have the affect of stopping
effect?
+the TSC. This is typically done for thermal emergency power control to prevent
+an overheating condition, and typically, there is no way to detect that this
+condition has happened.
+
+4.4) Migration
+
+Migration of a virtual machine raises problems for timekeeping in two ways.
+First, the migration itself may take time, during which interrupts cannot be
+delivered, and after which, the guest time may need to be caught up. NTP may
+be able to help to some degree here, as the clock correction required is
+typically small enough to fall in the NTP-correctable window.
+
+An additional concern is that timers based off the TSC (or HPET, if the raw bus
+clock is exposed) may now be running at different rates, requiring compensation
+in some may in the hypervisor by virtualizing these timers. In addition,
way?
+migrating to a faster machine may preclude the use of a passthrough TSC, as a
+faster clock cannot be made visible to a guest without the potential of time
+advancing faster than usual. A slower clock is less of a problem, as it can
+always be caught up to the original rate. KVM clock avoids these problems by
+simply storing multipliers and offsets gainst the TSC for the guest to convert
against?
+back into nanosecond resolution values.
+
Takuya
-- I'm not English speaker, so not so sure about some places.
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