[PATCH 00/17] ARM64 PMU Partitioning

[Colton Lewis]

Oliver Upton <oliver.upton at linux.dev> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 02, 2025 at 07:26:45PM +0000, Colton Lewis wrote:
>> Caveats:

>> Because the most consistent and performant thing to do was untrap
>> PMCR_EL0, the number of counters visible to the guest via PMCR_EL0.N
>> is always equal to the value KVM sets for MDCR_EL2.HPMN. Previously
>> allowed writes to PMCR_EL0.N via {GET,SET}_ONE_REG no longer affect
>> the guest.

>> These improvements come at a cost to 7-35 new registers that must be
>> swapped at every vcpu_load and vcpu_put if the feature is enabled. I
>> have been informed KVM would like to avoid paying this cost when
>> possible.

>> One solution is to make the trapping changes and context swapping lazy
>> such that the trapping changes and context swapping only take place
>> after the guest has actually accessed the PMU so guests that never
>> access the PMU never pay the cost.

> You should try and model this similar to how we manage the debug
> breakpoints/watchpoints. In that case the debug register context is
> loaded if either:

>   (1) Self-hosted debug is actively in use by the guest, or

>   (2) The guest has accessed a debug register since the last vcpu_load()

Okay

>> This is not done here because it is not crucial to the primary
>> functionality and I thought review would be more productive as soon as
>> I had something complete enough for reviewers to easily play with.

>> However, this or any better ideas are on the table for inclusion in
>> future re-rolls.

> One of the other things that I'd like to see is if we can pare down the
> amount of CPU feature dependencies for a partitioned PMU. Annoyingly,
> there aren't a lot of machines out there with FEAT_FGT yet, and you
> should be able to make all of this work in VHE + FEAT_PMUv3p1.

> That "just" comes at the cost of extra traps (leaving TPM and
> potentially TPMCR set). You can mitigate the cost of this by emulating
> accesses in the fast path that don't need to go out to a kernel context
> to be serviced. Same goes for requiring FEAT_HPMN0 to expose 0 event
> counters, we can fall back to TPM traps if needed.

> Taking perf out of the picture should still give you a significant
> reduction vPMU overheads.

Okay

> Last thing, let's table guest support for FEAT_PMUv3_ICNTR for the time
> being. Yes, it falls in the KVM-owned range, but we can just handle it
> with a fine-grained undef for now. Once the core infrastructure has
> landed upstream we can start layering new features into the partitioned
> implementation.

Sure

> Thanks,
> Oliver