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authorSean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com>2018-08-27 15:21:12 -0700
committerPaolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>2018-09-20 00:51:42 +0200
commitd264ee0c2ed20c6a426663590d4fc7a36cb6abd7 (patch)
tree7435ea3691a720a98b3bfcb08395787e52f48a8e /arch/unicore32
parentf459a707ed313f110e4939d634317edcf9e96774 (diff)
downloadlinux-d264ee0c2ed20c6a426663590d4fc7a36cb6abd7.tar.bz2
KVM: VMX: use preemption timer to force immediate VMExit
A VMX preemption timer value of '0' is guaranteed to cause a VMExit prior to the CPU executing any instructions in the guest. Use the preemption timer (if it's supported) to trigger immediate VMExit in place of the current method of sending a self-IPI. This ensures that pending VMExit injection to L1 occurs prior to executing any instructions in the guest (regardless of nesting level). When deferring VMExit injection, KVM generates an immediate VMExit from the (possibly nested) guest by sending itself an IPI. Because hardware interrupts are blocked prior to VMEnter and are unblocked (in hardware) after VMEnter, this results in taking a VMExit(INTR) before any guest instruction is executed. But, as this approach relies on the IPI being received before VMEnter executes, it only works as intended when KVM is running as L0. Because there are no architectural guarantees regarding when IPIs are delivered, when running nested the INTR may "arrive" long after L2 is running e.g. L0 KVM doesn't force an immediate switch to L1 to deliver an INTR. For the most part, this unintended delay is not an issue since the events being injected to L1 also do not have architectural guarantees regarding their timing. The notable exception is the VMX preemption timer[1], which is architecturally guaranteed to cause a VMExit prior to executing any instructions in the guest if the timer value is '0' at VMEnter. Specifically, the delay in injecting the VMExit causes the preemption timer KVM unit test to fail when run in a nested guest. Note: this approach is viable even on CPUs with a broken preemption timer, as broken in this context only means the timer counts at the wrong rate. There are no known errata affecting timer value of '0'. [1] I/O SMIs also have guarantees on when they arrive, but I have no idea if/how those are emulated in KVM. Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@intel.com> [Use a hook for SVM instead of leaving the default in x86.c - Paolo] Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
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