Date:	Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:07:03 -0700
From:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:	Radim Krcmar <rkrcmar@...hat.com>
Cc:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>, X86 ML <x86@...nel.org>,
	Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@...hat.com>,
	Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	kvm list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>, Alexander Graf <agraf@...e.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/5] x86/kvm: On KVM re-enable (e.g. after suspend),
 update clocks

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 3:59 PM, Radim Krcmar <rkrcmar@...hat.com> wrote:
> 2016-03-16 15:15-0700, Andy Lutomirski:
>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 3:06 PM, Radim Krcmar <rkrcmar@...hat.com> wrote:
>>> Guest TSC is going to jump backward with this patch, which would make
>>> the guest think that a lot of cycles passed.  This has no bearing on
>>> guest timekeeping, because the guest shouldn't be using raw TSC.
>>> If we wanted to do something though, there are at least two options:
>>> 1) Fake that TSC continued at roughly its specified rate:  compute how
>>>    many cycles could have elapsed while the CPU was suspended (using
>>>    host time before/after suspend and guest TSC frequency) and adjust
>>>    guest TSC.
>>> 2) Resume guest TSC at its last cycle before suspend.
>>>    (Roughly what KVM does now.)
>>>
>>> What are your opinions on TSC faking?
>>
>> I'd suggest restarting it wherever it left off, because it's simpler.
>> If there was a CLOCK_BOOT_RAW, you could try to track it, but I'm not
>> sure that such a thing exists.
>
> CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW can count in suspend, so CLOCK_BOOT_RAW would be a
> conditional alias and it probably doesn't exist because of that.
>
>> FWIW, if you ever intend to support ART ("always running timer")
>> passthrough, this is going to be a giant clusterfsck.  Good luck.  I
>> haven't gotten a straight answer as to what hardware actually supports
>> that thing, so even testing isn't no easy.
>
> Hm, AR TSC would be best handled by doing nothing ... dropping the
> faking logic just became tempting.

As it stands, ART is screwed if you adjust the VMCS's tsc offset.  But
I think it's also screwed if you migrate to a machine with a different
ratio of guest TSC ticks to host ART ticks or a different offset,
because the host isn't going to do the rdmsr every time it tries to
access the ART, so passing it through might require a paravirt
mechanism no matter what.

ISTM that, if KVM tries to keep the guest TSC monotonic across
migration, it should probably also keep it monotonic across host
suspend/resume.  After all, host suspend/resume is kind of like
migrating from the pre-suspend host to the post-resume host.  Maybe it
could even share code.

>
>>> ---
>>> Btw. I'll be spending some days to decipher kvmclock, so I'd also fix
>>> the masterclock+suspend issue, if you don't mind ... So far, I don't
>>> even see a reason to update kvmclock on kvm_arch_hardware_enable().
>>> Suspend is a condition that we want to handle, so kvm_resume would be a
>>> better place, but we handle suspend only because TSC and timekeeping has
>>> changed, so I think that the right place is in their event notifiers.
>>
>> I'd be glad to try to review things.  Please cc me.
>
> Ok.
>
>> One of the Xen people pointed me at the MS Viridian spec for handling
>> TSC rate changes on migration to or from hosts that don't support TSC
>> scaling.  I wonder if KVM could use the same technique or even the
>> same API.
>
> The TSC frequency MSR is read-only in Xen, so I guess it's equivalent to
> pvclock.  I'll take a deeper look, thanks for pointers.



-- 
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC

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