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Commit 58d5ec8f authored by Marc Zyngier's avatar Marc Zyngier Committed by Christoffer Dall
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ARM: KVM: Yield CPU when vcpu executes a WFE



On an (even slightly) oversubscribed system, spinlocks are quickly
becoming a bottleneck, as some vcpus are spinning, waiting for a
lock to be released, while the vcpu holding the lock may not be
running at all.

This creates contention, and the observed slowdown is 40x for
hackbench. No, this isn't a typo.

The solution is to trap blocking WFEs and tell KVM that we're
now spinning. This ensures that other vpus will get a scheduling
boost, allowing the lock to be released more quickly. Also, using
CONFIG_HAVE_KVM_CPU_RELAX_INTERCEPT slightly improves the performance
when the VM is severely overcommited.

Quick test to estimate the performance: hackbench 1 process 1000

2xA15 host (baseline):	1.843s

2xA15 guest w/o patch:	2.083s
4xA15 guest w/o patch:	80.212s
8xA15 guest w/o patch:	Could not be bothered to find out

2xA15 guest w/ patch:	2.102s
4xA15 guest w/ patch:	3.205s
8xA15 guest w/ patch:	6.887s

So we go from a 40x degradation to 1.5x in the 2x overcommit case,
which is vaguely more acceptable.

Signed-off-by: default avatarMarc Zyngier <marc.zyngier@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoffer Dall <christoffer.dall@linaro.org>
parent d5701426
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