[PATCH v2 0/8] Add support for monitoring guest TLB operations

Punit Agrawal punit.agrawal at arm.com
Wed Oct 26 10:41:40 PDT 2016


Hi,

This is the fourth posting of this series. The biggest change compared
to previous vesion is the addition of support for ARM hosts. With the
addition of ARM support, the patchset is now more complete. Prior
versions can be found at [0][1][2].

I would particularly appreciate feedback from maintainers on the
approach to tie the control of TLB monitoring with perf trace events
(Patch 3 and 4) especially if there are any suggestions on avoiding
(or reducing) the overhead of "perf trace" notifications.

I looked at using regfunc/unregfunc tracepoint hooks but they don't
include the event context. But the bigger problem was that the
callbacks are only called on the first instance of simultaneously
executing perf stat invocations.

Changelog and previous cover-letter follows.

Changes:

v1 -> v2

* New (Patch 6) - Add support for trapping and emulating TLB
  operations to ARM hosts
* Move common code to handle perf trace notifications to virt/kvm/arm
* Move tracepoint to include/trace/events/kvm.h
* Drop patch to introduce __tlbi helper as it is now merged
* Reorder patches

RFC v2 -> v1
* Dropped the RFC tag
* Patch 2 - Use VM thread group id for identification
* Patch 4 - Update comment for clarity
* Patch 6 - Add comment explaining switch to hype-role when VHE is enabled
* Patch 7 - Add comment to clarify struct kvm_trace_hook

RFC -> RFC v2
* Patch 4 - Rename left-over TLBI macro to __TLBI
* Patch 6 - Replace individual TLB operation emulation with
  invalidating all stage 1 TLB for the VM. TLB monitoring is expected
  to be a debug feature and performance is not critical.

Although there are no PMU events to monitor TLB operations, ARMv8
supports trapping guest TLB maintenance operations to the
hypervisor. This trapping mechanism can be used to monitor the use of
guest TLB instructions.

As taking a trap for every TLB operation can have significant
overhead, trapping should only be enabled -

* on user request
* for the VM of interest

This patchset adds support to listen to perf trace event state change
notifications. The notifications and associated context are then used
to enable trapping of guest TLB operations when requested by the
user. The trap handling generates trace events (kvm_tlb_invalidate)
which can already be counted using existing perf trace functionality.

With this patchset, 'perf' tool when attached to a VM process can be
used to monitor the TLB operations. E.g., to monitor a VM with process
id 4166 -

# perf stat -e "kvm:kvm_tlb_invalidate" -p 4166

Perform some operations in VM (running 'make -j 7' on the kernel
sources in this instance). Breaking out of perf shows -

Performance counter stats for process id '4166':

         7,471,974      kvm:kvm_tlb_invalidate

     374.235405282 seconds time elapsed

Thanks,
Punit

[0] http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg1210715.html
[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg1224353.html
[2] https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=147376184208258&w=2

Mark Rutland (1):
  arm64/kvm: hyp: tlb: use __tlbi() helper

Punit Agrawal (7):
  KVM: Track the pid of the VM process
  perf/trace: Add notification for perf trace events
  KVM: arm/arm64: Register perf trace event notifier
  KVM: Add event to trace tlb invalidations
  arm: KVM: Handle trappable TLB instructions
  arm64: KVM: Handle trappable TLB instructions
  KVM: arm/arm64: Enable selective trapping of TLB instructions

 arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_asm.h    |   1 +
 arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_host.h   |   8 ++
 arch/arm/kvm/Kconfig              |   4 +
 arch/arm/kvm/Makefile             |   1 +
 arch/arm/kvm/arm.c                |   2 +
 arch/arm/kvm/coproc.c             |  55 ++++++++++++++
 arch/arm/kvm/hyp/tlb.c            |  33 ++++++++
 arch/arm64/include/asm/kvm_asm.h  |   1 +
 arch/arm64/include/asm/kvm_host.h |   8 ++
 arch/arm64/kvm/Kconfig            |   4 +
 arch/arm64/kvm/Makefile           |   1 +
 arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/tlb.c          |  87 +++++++++++++++++++--
 arch/arm64/kvm/sys_regs.c         |  81 ++++++++++++++++++++
 include/linux/kvm_host.h          |   1 +
 include/linux/trace_events.h      |   3 +
 include/trace/events/kvm.h        |  17 +++++
 kernel/trace/trace_event_perf.c   |  24 ++++++
 virt/kvm/arm/perf_trace.c         | 154 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 virt/kvm/kvm_main.c               |   2 +
 19 files changed, 481 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 virt/kvm/arm/perf_trace.c

-- 
2.9.3




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