The pvclock vdso code was too abstracted to understand easily and
excessively paranoid. Simplify it for a huge speedup.
This opens the door for additional simplifications, as the vdso no
longer accesses the pvti for any vcpu other than vcpu 0.
Before, vclock_gettime using kvm-clock took about 64ns on my machine.
With this change, it takes 19ns, which is almost as fast as the pure TSC
implementation.
--- a/arch/x86/vdso/vclock_gettime.c
+++ b/arch/x86/vdso/vclock_gettime.c
@@ -78,47 +78,59 @@ static notrace const struct pvclock_vsyscall_time_info *get_pvti(int cpu)
static notrace cycle_t vread_pvclock(int *mode)
{
- const struct pvclock_vsyscall_time_info *pvti;
+ const struct pvclock_vcpu_time_info *pvti = &get_pvti(0)->pvti;
+ * Note: The kernel and hypervisor must guarantee that cpu ID
+ * number maps 1:1 to per-CPU pvclock time info.
+ *
+ * Because the hypervisor is entirely unaware of guest userspace
+ * preemption, it cannot guarantee that per-CPU pvclock time
+ * info is updated if the underlying CPU changes or that that
+ * version is increased whenever underlying CPU changes.
+ *
+ * On KVM, we are guaranteed that pvti updates for any vCPU are
+ * atomic as seen by *all* vCPUs. This is an even stronger
+ * guarantee than we get with a normal seqlock.
*
+ * On Xen, we don't appear to have that guarantee, but Xen still
+ * supplies a valid seqlock using the version field.
+
+ * We only do pvclock vdso timing at all if
+ * PVCLOCK_TSC_STABLE_BIT is set, and we interpret that bit to
+ * mean that all vCPUs have matching pvti and that the TSC is
+ * synced, so we can just look at vCPU 0's pvti.