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Roger Pau Monne 22650d6054 x86/hvmloader: select xen platform pci MMIO BAR UC or WB MTRR cache attribute
The Xen platform PCI device (vendor ID 0x5853) exposed to x86 HVM guests
doesn't have the functionality of a traditional PCI device.  The exposed
MMIO BAR is used by some guests (including Linux) as a safe place to map
foreign memory, including the grant table itself.

Traditionally BARs from devices have the uncacheable (UC) cache attribute
from the MTRR, to ensure correct functionality of such devices.  hvmloader
mimics this behavior and sets the MTRR attributes of both the low and high
PCI MMIO windows (where BARs of PCI devices reside) as UC in MTRR.

This however causes performance issues for users of the Xen platform PCI
device BAR, as for the purposes of mapping remote memory there's no need to
use the UC attribute.  On Intel systems this is worked around by using
iPAT, that allows the hypervisor to force the effective cache attribute of
a p2m entry regardless of the guest PAT value.  AMD however doesn't have an
equivalent of iPAT, and guest PAT values are always considered.

Linux commit:

41925b105e34 xen: replace xen_remap() with memremap()

Attempted to mitigate this by forcing mappings of the grant-table to use
the write-back (WB) cache attribute.  However Linux memremap() takes MTRRs
into account to calculate which PAT type to use, and seeing the MTRR cache
attribute for the region being UC the PAT also ends up as UC, regardless of
the caller having requested WB.

As a workaround to allow current Linux to map the grant-table as WB using
memremap() introduce an xl.cfg option (xen_platform_pci_bar_uc=0) that can
be used to select whether the Xen platform PCI device BAR will have the UC
attribute in MTRR.  Such workaround in hvmloader should also be paired with
a fix for Linux so it attempts to change the MTRR of the Xen platform PCI
device BAR to WB by itself.

Overall, the long term solution would be to provide the guest with a safe
range in the guest physical address space where mappings to foreign pages
can be created.

Some vif throughput performance figures provided by Anthoine from a 8
vCPUs, 4GB of RAM HVM guest(s) running on AMD hardware:

Without this patch:
vm -> dom0: 1.1Gb/s
vm -> vm:   5.0Gb/s

With the patch:
vm -> dom0: 4.5Gb/s
vm -> vm:   7.0Gb/s

Reported-by: Anthoine Bourgeois <anthoine.bourgeois@vates.tech>
Signed-off-by: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@citrix.com>
Reviewed-by: Oleksii Kurochko<oleksii.kurochko@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> # hvmloader
Reviewed-by: Anthony PERARD <anthony.perard@vates.tech>
2025-06-18 09:30:11 +02:00
..
2025-06-02 10:31:21 +02:00
2025-02-21 14:55:13 +00:00
2018-11-14 19:25:11 +00:00
2025-03-03 16:15:40 -08:00

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