Skip to content
Commit 9dc2babc authored by Nicholas Piggin's avatar Nicholas Piggin Committed by Michael Ellerman
Browse files

KVM: PPC: Book3S HV P9: Stop handling hcalls in real-mode in the P9 path



In the interest of minimising the amount of code that is run in
"real-mode", don't handle hcalls in real mode in the P9 path. This
requires some new handlers for H_CEDE and xics-on-xive to be added
before xive is pulled or cede logic is checked.

This introduces a change in radix guest behaviour where radix guests
that execute 'sc 1' in userspace now get a privilege fault whereas
previously the 'sc 1' would be reflected as a syscall interrupt to the
guest kernel. That reflection is only required for hash guests that run
PR KVM.

Background:

In POWER8 and earlier processors, it is very expensive to exit from the
HV real mode context of a guest hypervisor interrupt, and switch to host
virtual mode. On those processors, guest->HV interrupts reach the
hypervisor with the MMU off because the MMU is loaded with guest context
(LPCR, SDR1, SLB), and the other threads in the sub-core need to be
pulled out of the guest too. Then the primary must save off guest state,
invalidate SLB and ERAT, and load up host state before the MMU can be
enabled to run in host virtual mode (~= regular Linux mode).

Hash guests also require a lot of hcalls to run due to the nature of the
MMU architecture and paravirtualisation design. The XICS interrupt
controller requires hcalls to run.

So KVM traditionally tries hard to avoid the full exit, by handling
hcalls and other interrupts in real mode as much as possible.

By contrast, POWER9 has independent MMU context per-thread, and in radix
mode the hypervisor is in host virtual memory mode when the HV interrupt
is taken. Radix guests do not require significant hcalls to manage their
translations, and xive guests don't need hcalls to handle interrupts. So
it's much less important for performance to handle hcalls in real mode on
POWER9.

One caveat is that the TCE hcalls are performance critical, real-mode
variants introduced for POWER8 in order to achieve 10GbE performance.
Real mode TCE hcalls were found to be less important on POWER9, which
was able to drive 40GBe networking without them (using the virt mode
hcalls) but performance is still important. These hcalls will benefit
from subsequent guest entry/exit optimisation including possibly a
faster "partial exit" that does not entirely switch to host context to
handle the hcall.

Signed-off-by: default avatarNicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarAlexey Kardashevskiy <aik@ozlabs.ru>
Reviewed-by: default avatarCédric Le Goater <clg@kaod.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210528090752.3542186-14-npiggin@gmail.com
parent 48013cbc
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment