Date:   Thu, 6 Aug 2020 05:53:18 -0400
From:   "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
To:     Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@...hat.com>
Cc:     kvm@...r.kernel.org, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@...el.com>,
        Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@...cent.com>,
        Jim Mattson <jmattson@...gle.com>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>,
        Julia Suvorova <jsuvorov@...hat.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] KVM: x86: KVM_MEM_PCI_HOLE memory

On Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 11:19:55AM +0200, Vitaly Kuznetsov wrote:
> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 04:37:38PM +0200, Vitaly Kuznetsov wrote:
> >> This is a continuation of "[PATCH RFC 0/5] KVM: x86: KVM_MEM_ALLONES
> >> memory" work: 
> >> https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20200514180540.52407-1-vkuznets@redhat.com/
> >> and pairs with Julia's "x86/PCI: Use MMCONFIG by default for KVM guests":
> >> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pci/20200722001513.298315-1-jusual@redhat.com/
> >> 
> >> PCIe config space can (depending on the configuration) be quite big but
> >> usually is sparsely populated. Guest may scan it by accessing individual
> >> device's page which, when device is missing, is supposed to have 'pci
> >> hole' semantics: reads return '0xff' and writes get discarded.
> >> 
> >> When testing Linux kernel boot with QEMU q35 VM and direct kernel boot
> >> I observed 8193 accesses to PCI hole memory. When such exit is handled
> >> in KVM without exiting to userspace, it takes roughly 0.000001 sec.
> >> Handling the same exit in userspace is six times slower (0.000006 sec) so
> >> the overal; difference is 0.04 sec. This may be significant for 'microvm'
> >> ideas.
> >> 
> >> Note, the same speed can already be achieved by using KVM_MEM_READONLY
> >> but doing this would require allocating real memory for all missing
> >> devices and e.g. 8192 pages gives us 32mb. This will have to be allocated
> >> for each guest separately and for 'microvm' use-cases this is likely
> >> a no-go.
> >> 
> >> Introduce special KVM_MEM_PCI_HOLE memory: userspace doesn't need to
> >> back it with real memory, all reads from it are handled inside KVM and
> >> return '0xff'. Writes still go to userspace but these should be extremely
> >> rare.
> >> 
> >> The original 'KVM_MEM_ALLONES' idea had additional optimizations: KVM
> >> was mapping all 'PCI hole' pages to a single read-only page stuffed with
> >> 0xff. This is omitted in this submission as the benefits are unclear:
> >> KVM will have to allocate SPTEs (either on demand or aggressively) and
> >> this also consumes time/memory.
> >
> > Curious about this: if we do it aggressively on the 1st fault,
> > how long does it take to allocate 256 huge page SPTEs?
> > And the amount of memory seems pretty small then, right?
> 
> Right, this could work but we'll need a 2M region (one per KVM host of
> course) filled with 0xff-s instead of a single 4k page.

Given it's global doesn't sound too bad.

> 
> Generally, I'd like to reach an agreement on whether this feature (and
> the corresponding Julia's patch addding PV feature bit) is worthy. In
> case it is (meaning it gets merged in this simplest form), we can
> suggest further improvements. It would also help if firmware (SeaBIOS,
> OVMF) would start recognizing the PV feature bit too, this way we'll be
> seeing even bigger improvement and this may or may not be a deal-breaker
> when it comes to the 'aggressive PTE mapping' idea.

About the feature bit, I am not sure why it's really needed. A single
mmio access is cheaper than two io accesses anyway, right? So it makes
sense for a kvm guest whether host has this feature or not.
We need to be careful and limit to a specific QEMU implementation
to avoid tripping up bugs, but it seems more appropriate to
check it using pci host IDs.

> -- 
> Vitaly

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