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Roger Pau Monné a8fbb0f1a3 x86: do not enable global pages when virtualized on AMD or Hygon hardware
When using global pages a full tlb flush can only be performed by
toggling the PGE bit in CR4, which is usually quite expensive in terms
of performance when running virtualized. This is specially relevant on
AMD or Hygon hardware, which doesn't have the ability to do selective
CR4 trapping, but can also be relevant on e.g. Intel if the underlying
hypervisor also traps accesses to the PGE CR4 bit.

In order to avoid this performance penalty, do not use global pages
when running virtualized on AMD or Hygon hardware. A command line option
'global-pages' is provided in order to allow the user to select whether
global pages will be enabled for PV guests.

The above figures are from a PV shim running on AMD hardware with
32 vCPUs:

PGE enabled, x2APIC mode:

(XEN) Global lock flush_lock: addr=ffff82d0804b01c0, lockval=1adb1adb, not locked
(XEN)   lock:1841883(1375128998543), block:1658716(10193054890781)

Average lock time:   746588ns
Average block time: 6145147ns

PGE disabled, x2APIC mode:

(XEN) Global lock flush_lock: addr=ffff82d0804af1c0, lockval=a8bfa8bf, not locked
(XEN)   lock:2730175(657505389886), block:2039716(2963768247738)

Average lock time:   240829ns
Average block time: 1453029ns

As seen from the above figures the lock and block time of the flush
lock is reduced to approximately 1/3 of the original value.

Note that XEN_MINIMAL_CR4 and mmu_cr4_features are not modified, and
thus global pages are left enabled for the hypervisor. This is not an
issue because the code to switch the control registers (cr3 and cr4)
already takes into account such situation and performs the necessary
flushes. The same already happens when using XPTI or PCIDE, as the
guest cr4 doesn't have global pages enabled in that case either.

Also note that the suspend and resume code is correct in writing
mmu_cr4_features into cr4 on resume, since that's the cr4 used by the
idle vCPU which is the context used by the suspend and resume routine.

Signed-off-by: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@citrix.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>

x86/pv: Fix `global-pages` to match the documentation

c/s 5de961d9c0 "x86: do not enable global pages when virtualized on AMD or
Hygon hardware" in fact does.  Fix the calculation in pge_init().

While fixing this, adjust the command line documenation, first to use the
newer style, and to expand the description to discuss cases where the option
might be useful to use, but Xen can't account for by default.

Fixes: 5de961d9c0 ('x86: do not enable global pages when virtualized on AMD or Hygon hardware')
Signed-off-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
Reviewed-by: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
master commit: 5de961d9c0
master date: 2019-12-10 11:34:00 +0100
master commit: b041709c36
master date: 2019-12-16 16:04:10 +0000
2020-04-09 08:56:08 +02:00
..
2019-03-13 13:40:23 +00:00
2018-11-14 19:25:11 +00:00
2016-04-01 11:07:28 +08:00

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