KVM: x86/mmu: Split huge pages mapped by the TDP MMU when dirty logging is enabled

When dirty logging is enabled without initially-all-set, try to split
all huge pages in the memslot down to 4KB pages so that vCPUs do not
have to take expensive write-protection faults to split huge pages.

Eager page splitting is best-effort only. This commit only adds the
support for the TDP MMU, and even there splitting may fail due to out
of memory conditions. Failures to split a huge page is fine from a
correctness standpoint because KVM will always follow up splitting by
write-protecting any remaining huge pages.

Eager page splitting moves the cost of splitting huge pages off of the
vCPU threads and onto the thread enabling dirty logging on the memslot.
This is useful because:

 1. Splitting on the vCPU thread interrupts vCPUs execution and is
    disruptive to customers whereas splitting on VM ioctl threads can
    run in parallel with vCPU execution.

 2. Splitting all huge pages at once is more efficient because it does
    not require performing VM-exit handling or walking the page table for
    every 4KiB page in the memslot, and greatly reduces the amount of
    contention on the mmu_lock.

For example, when running dirty_log_perf_test with 96 virtual CPUs, 1GiB
per vCPU, and 1GiB HugeTLB memory, the time it takes vCPUs to write to
all of their memory after dirty logging is enabled decreased by 95% from
2.94s to 0.14s.

Eager Page Splitting is over 100x more efficient than the current
implementation of splitting on fault under the read lock. For example,
taking the same workload as above, Eager Page Splitting reduced the CPU
required to split all huge pages from ~270 CPU-seconds ((2.94s - 0.14s)
* 96 vCPU threads) to only 1.55 CPU-seconds.

Eager page splitting does increase the amount of time it takes to enable
dirty logging since it has split all huge pages. For example, the time
it took to enable dirty logging in the 96GiB region of the
aforementioned test increased from 0.001s to 1.55s.

Reviewed-by: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David Matlack <dmatlack@google.com>
Message-Id: <20220119230739.2234394-16-dmatlack@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index f5a27f067db9..5d80a0faa096 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -2339,6 +2339,30 @@
 	kvm.ignore_msrs=[KVM] Ignore guest accesses to unhandled MSRs.
 			Default is 0 (don't ignore, but inject #GP)
 
+	kvm.eager_page_split=
+			[KVM,X86] Controls whether or not KVM will try to
+			proactively split all huge pages during dirty logging.
+			Eager page splitting reduces interruptions to vCPU
+			execution by eliminating the write-protection faults
+			and MMU lock contention that would otherwise be
+			required to split huge pages lazily.
+
+			VM workloads that rarely perform writes or that write
+			only to a small region of VM memory may benefit from
+			disabling eager page splitting to allow huge pages to
+			still be used for reads.
+
+			The behavior of eager page splitting depends on whether
+			KVM_DIRTY_LOG_INITIALLY_SET is enabled or disabled. If
+			disabled, all huge pages in a memslot will be eagerly
+			split when dirty logging is enabled on that memslot. If
+			enabled, huge pages will not be eagerly split.
+
+			Eager page splitting currently only supports splitting
+			huge pages mapped by the TDP MMU.
+
+			Default is Y (on).
+
 	kvm.enable_vmware_backdoor=[KVM] Support VMware backdoor PV interface.
 				   Default is false (don't support).