The following patches add nested EPT support to Nested VMX.
Nested EPT means emulating EPT for an L1 guest, allowing it use EPT when
running a nested guest L2. When L1 uses EPT, it allows the L2 guest to set
its own cr3 and take its own page faults without either of L0 or L1 getting
involved. In many workloads this significanlty improves L2's performance over
the previous two alternatives (shadow page tables over ept, and shadow page
tables over shadow page tables). Our paper [1] described these three options,
and the advantages of nested EPT ("multidimensional paging").
Nested EPT is enabled by default (if the hardware supports EPT), so users do
not have to do anything special to enjoy the performance improvement that
this patch gives to L2 guests.
Just as a non-scientific, non-representative indication of the kind of
dramatic performance improvement you may see in workloads that have a lot of
context switches and page faults, here is a measurement of the time
an example single-threaded "make" took in L2 (kvm over kvm):
shadow over shadow: 105 seconds
("ept=0" forces this)
shadow over EPT: 87 seconds
(the previous default; Can be forced now with "nested_ept=0")
EPT over EPT: 29 seconds
(the default after this patch)
Note that the same test on L1 (with EPT) took 25 seconds, so for this example
workload, performance of nested virtualization is now very close to that of
single-level virtualization.
[1] "The Turtles Project: Design and Implementation of Nested Virtualization",
http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Ben-Yehuda.pdf
Patch statistics:
-----------------
Documentation/virtual/kvm/nested-vmx.txt | 4
arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 1
arch/x86/include/asm/vmx.h | 2
arch/x86/kvm/mmu.c | 16 -
arch/x86/kvm/paging_tmpl.h | 6
arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c | 259 ++++++++++++++++++++-
arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 11
7 files changed, 269 insertions(+), 30 deletions(-)
--
Nadav Har'El
IBM Haifa Research Lab
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