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  1. Apr 21, 2015
    • Paul Mackerras's avatar
      KVM: PPC: Book3S HV: Create debugfs file for each guest's HPT · e23a808b
      Paul Mackerras authored 
      

This creates a debugfs directory for each HV guest (assuming debugfs
is enabled in the kernel config), and within that directory, a file
by which the contents of the guest's HPT (hashed page table) can be
read.  The directory is named vmnnnn, where nnnn is the PID of the
process that created the guest.  The file is named "htab".  This is
intended to help in debugging problems in the host's management
of guest memory.

The contents of the file consist of a series of lines like this:

  3f48 4000d032bf003505 0000000bd7ff1196 00000003b5c71196

The first field is the index of the entry in the HPT, the second and
third are the HPT entry, so the third entry contains the real page
number that is mapped by the entry if the entry's valid bit is set.
The fourth field is the guest's view of the second doubleword of the
entry, so it contains the guest physical address.  (The format of the
second through fourth fields are described in the Power ISA and also
in arch/powerpc/include/asm/mmu-hash64.h.)

Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAlexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
      e23a808b
  3. Apr 10, 2015
  5. Apr 08, 2015
  7. Mar 31, 2015
  9. Mar 30, 2015
  11. Mar 26, 2015
  13. Mar 24, 2015
    • Igor Mammedov's avatar
      kvm: avoid page allocation failure in kvm_set_memory_region() · 74496134
      Igor Mammedov authored 
      

KVM guest can fail to startup with following trace on host:

qemu-system-x86: page allocation failure: order:4, mode:0x40d0
Call Trace:
  dump_stack+0x47/0x67
  warn_alloc_failed+0xee/0x150
  __alloc_pages_direct_compact+0x14a/0x150
  __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x776/0xb80
  alloc_kmem_pages+0x3a/0x110
  kmalloc_order+0x13/0x50
  kmemdup+0x1b/0x40
  __kvm_set_memory_region+0x24a/0x9f0 [kvm]
  kvm_set_ioapic+0x130/0x130 [kvm]
  kvm_set_memory_region+0x21/0x40 [kvm]
  kvm_vm_ioctl+0x43f/0x750 [kvm]

Failure happens when attempting to allocate pages for
'struct kvm_memslots', however it doesn't have to be
present in physically contiguous (kmalloc-ed) address
space, change allocation to kvm_kvzalloc() so that
it will be vmalloc-ed when its size is more then a page.

Signed-off-by: default avatarIgor Mammedov <imammedo@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMarcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
      74496134
  15. Mar 19, 2015
  17. Mar 14, 2015
  19. Mar 13, 2015
  21. Mar 12, 2015
  23. Mar 11, 2015
  25. Mar 10, 2015
  27. Feb 12, 2015
  29. Feb 09, 2015
  31. Feb 06, 2015
    • Paolo Bonzini's avatar
      kvm: add halt_poll_ns module parameter · f7819512
      Paolo Bonzini authored 
      

This patch introduces a new module parameter for the KVM module; when it
is present, KVM attempts a bit of polling on every HLT before scheduling
itself out via kvm_vcpu_block.

This parameter helps a lot for latency-bound workloads---in particular
I tested it with O_DSYNC writes with a battery-backed disk in the host.
In this case, writes are fast (because the data doesn't have to go all
the way to the platters) but they cannot be merged by either the host or
the guest.  KVM's performance here is usually around 30% of bare metal,
or 50% if you use cache=directsync or cache=writethrough (these
parameters avoid that the guest sends pointless flush requests, and
at the same time they are not slow because of the battery-backed cache).
The bad performance happens because on every halt the host CPU decides
to halt itself too.  When the interrupt comes, the vCPU thread is then
migrated to a new physical CPU, and in general the latency is horrible
because the vCPU thread has to be scheduled back in.

With this patch performance reaches 60-65% of bare metal and, more
important, 99% of what you get if you use idle=poll in the guest.  This
means that the tunable gets rid of this particular bottleneck, and more
work can be done to improve performance in the kernel or QEMU.

Of course there is some price to pay; every time an otherwise idle vCPUs
is interrupted by an interrupt, it will poll unnecessarily and thus
impose a little load on the host.  The above results were obtained with
a mostly random value of the parameter (500000), and the load was around
1.5-2.5% CPU usage on one of the host's core for each idle guest vCPU.

The patch also adds a new stat, /sys/kernel/debug/kvm/halt_successful_poll,
that can be used to tune the parameter.  It counts how many HLT
instructions received an interrupt during the polling period; each
successful poll avoids that Linux schedules the VCPU thread out and back
in, and may also avoid a likely trip to C1 and back for the physical CPU.

While the VM is idle, a Linux 4 VCPU VM halts around 10 times per second.
Of these halts, almost all are failed polls.  During the benchmark,
instead, basically all halts end within the polling period, except a more
or less constant stream of 50 per second coming from vCPUs that are not
running the benchmark.  The wasted time is thus very low.  Things may
be slightly different for Windows VMs, which have a ~10 ms timer tick.

The effect is also visible on Marcelo's recently-introduced latency
test for the TSC deadline timer.  Though of course a non-RT kernel has
awful latency bounds, the latency of the timer is around 8000-10000 clock
cycles compared to 20000-120000 without setting halt_poll_ns.  For the TSC
deadline timer, thus, the effect is both a smaller average latency and
a smaller variance.

Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
      f7819512