[PATCH 00/11] KVM: arm64: Add NV timer support

Oliver Upton oliver.upton at linux.dev
Wed Dec 4 16:40:27 PST 2024


On Mon, Dec 02, 2024 at 05:21:23PM +0000, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> Here's another batch of NV-related patches, this time bringing in most
> of the timer support for EL2 as well as nested guests.
> 
> The code is pretty convoluted for a bunch of reasons:
> 
> - FEAT_NV2 breaks the timer semantics by redirecting HW controls to
>   memory, meaning that a guest could setup a timer and never see it
>   firing until the next exit
> 
> - We go try hard to reflect the timer state in memory, but that's not
>   great.
> 
> - With FEAT_ECV, we can finally correctly emulate the virtual timer,
>   but this emulation is pretty costly
> 
> - As a way to make things suck less, we handle timer reads as early as
>   possible, and only defer writes to the normal trap handling
> 
> - Finally, some implementations are badly broken, and require some
>   hand-holding, irrespective of NV support. So we try and reuse the NV
>   infrastructure to make them usable. This could be further optimised,
>   but I'm running out of patience for this sort of HW.
> 
> What this is not implementing is support for CNTPOFF_EL2. It appears
> that the architecture doesn't let you correctly emulate it, so I guess
> this will be trap/emulate for the foreseeable future.
> 
> This series is on top of v6.13-rc1, and has been tested on my usual M2
> setup, but also on a Snapdragon X1 Elite devkit. I would like to thank
> Qualcomm for the free hardware with no strings (nor support) attached!

This series is looking pretty good to me, but I think it'd be good to
remap "EL0 timer" -> "EL1 timer" throughout this series to match the
architectural term.

-- 
Thanks,
Oliver



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