Re: [PATCH v1 0/5] KVM in-guest performance monitoring

From: Joerg Roedel
Date: Thu May 12 2011 - 09:44:00 EST


On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 03:23:39PM +0200, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> On 2011-05-12 15:11, Joerg Roedel wrote:

> > Seriously, I think such decisions should be technical only and not
> > political like that. The losers of such political decisions are always
> > the users because they don't get useful features that are technical
> > possible.
>
> Paravirt remains a workaround, useful until hardware provides a solution
> for all guests, and that often in an even more efficient way (like for
> MMU virtualization).

Fully agreed. And todays x86 CPUs lack proper support for virtualizing
the PMU. That will hopefully change but users want the feature today.

> We do not need to block a PV-PMU for Linux guests (or other OSes that
> want to adopt to it), but that will not be a solution for the problem,
> that's my point. A PV-PMU may even be useful to demonstrate usefulness
> of a virtual PMU the CPU vendors (if they aren't aware of this yet).

Right, if users actually use the virtual PMU this probably increases the
priority for proper hardware support.

Joerg

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