[PATCH v3 00/41] Optimize KVM/ARM for VHE systems

[Yury Norov]

Hi Christoffer,

[CC Sunil Goutham <Sunil.Goutham at cavium.com>]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 01:07:06PM +0100, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> This series redesigns parts of KVM/ARM to optimize the performance on
> VHE systems.  The general approach is to try to do as little work as
> possible when transitioning between the VM and the hypervisor.  This has
> the benefit of lower latency when waiting for interrupts and delivering
> virtual interrupts, and reduces the overhead of emulating behavior and
> I/O in the host kernel.
> 
> Patches 01 through 06 are not VHE specific, but rework parts of KVM/ARM
> that can be generally improved.  We then add infrastructure to move more
> logic into vcpu_load and vcpu_put, we improve handling of VFP and debug
> registers.
> 
> We then introduce a new world-switch function for VHE systems, which we
> can tweak and optimize for VHE systems.  To do that, we rework a lot of
> the system register save/restore handling and emulation code that may
> need access to system registers, so that we can defer as many system
> register save/restore operations to vcpu_load and vcpu_put, and move
> this logic out of the VHE world switch function.
> 
> We then optimize the configuration of traps.  On non-VHE systems, both
> the host and VM kernels run in EL1, but because the host kernel should
> have full access to the underlying hardware, but the VM kernel should
> not, we essentially make the host kernel more privileged than the VM
> kernel despite them both running at the same privilege level by enabling
> VE traps when entering the VM and disabling those traps when exiting the
> VM.  On VHE systems, the host kernel runs in EL2 and has full access to
> the hardware (as much as allowed by secure side software), and is
> unaffected by the trap configuration.  That means we can configure the
> traps for VMs running in EL1 once, and don't have to switch them on and
> off for every entry/exit to/from the VM.
> 
> Finally, we improve our VGIC handling by moving all save/restore logic
> out of the VHE world-switch, and we make it possible to truly only
> evaluate if the AP list is empty and not do *any* VGIC work if that is
> the case, and only do the minimal amount of work required in the course
> of the VGIC processing when we have virtual interrupts in flight.
> 
> The patches are based on v4.15-rc3, v9 of the level-triggered mapped
> interrupts support series [1], and the first five patches of James' SDEI
> series [2].
> 
> I've given the patches a fair amount of testing on Thunder-X, Mustang,
> Seattle, and TC2 (32-bit) for non-VHE testing, and tested VHE
> functionality on the Foundation model, running both 64-bit VMs and
> 32-bit VMs side-by-side and using both GICv3-on-GICv3 and
> GICv2-on-GICv3.
> 
> The patches are also available in the vhe-optimize-v3 branch on my
> kernel.org repository [3].  The vhe-optimize-v3-base branch contains
> prerequisites of this series.
> 
> Changes since v2:
>  - Rebased on v4.15-rc3.
>  - Includes two additional patches that only does vcpu_load after
>    kvm_vcpu_first_run_init and only for KVM_RUN.
>  - Addressed review comments from v2 (detailed changelogs are in the
>    individual patches).
> 
> Thanks,
> -Christoffer
> 
> [1]: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cdall/linux.git level-mapped-v9
> [2]: git://linux-arm.org/linux-jm.git sdei/v5/base
> [3]: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cdall/linux.git vhe-optimize-v3

I tested this v3 series on ThunderX2 with IPI benchmark:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/11/364

I tried to address your comments in discussion to v2, like pinning
the module to specific CPU (with taskset), increasing the number of
iterations, tuning governor to max performance. Results didn't change
much, and are pretty stable.

Comparing to vanilla guest, Norml IPI delivery for v3 is 20% slower.
For v2 it was 27% slower, and for v1 - 42% faster. What's interesting,
the acknowledge time is much faster for v3, so overall time to
deliver and acknowledge IPI (2nd column) is less than vanilla
4.15-rc3 kernel.

Test setup is not changed since v2: ThunderX2, 112 online CPUs,
guest is running under qemu-kvm, emulating gic version 3.

Below is test results for v1-3 normalized to host vanilla kernel
dry-run time.

Yury

Host, v4.14:
Dry-run:          0         1
Self-IPI:         9        18
Normal IPI:      81       110
Broadcast IPI:    0      2106

Guest, v4.14:
Dry-run:          0         1
Self-IPI:        10        18
Normal IPI:     305       525
Broadcast IPI:    0      9729

Guest, v4.14 + VHE:
Dry-run:          0         1
Self-IPI:         9        18
Normal IPI:     176       343
Broadcast IPI:    0      9885

And for v2.

Host, v4.15:                   
Dry-run:          0         1
Self-IPI:         9        18
Normal IPI:      79       108
Broadcast IPI:    0      2102
                        
Guest, v4.15-rc:
Dry-run:          0         1
Self-IPI:         9        18
Normal IPI:     291       526
Broadcast IPI:    0     10439

Guest, v4.15-rc + VHE:
Dry-run:          0         2
Self-IPI:        14        28
Normal IPI:     370       569
Broadcast IPI:    0     11688

And for v3.

Host 4.15-rc3					
Dry-run:	  0	    1
Self-IPI:	  9	   18
Normal IPI:	 80	  110
Broadcast IPI:	  0	 2088
		
Guest, 4.15-rc3	
Dry-run:	  0	    1
Self-IPI:	  9	   18
Normal IPI:	289	  497
Broadcast IPI:	  0	 9999
		
Guest, 4.15-rc3	+ VHE
Dry-run:	  0	    2
Self-IPI:	 12	   24
Normal IPI:	347	  490
Broadcast IPI:	  0	11906