Re: [PATCH 6/5] KVM: x86: fix periodic lapic timer with hrtimers

From: Wanpeng Li
Date: Wed Oct 26 2016 - 06:24:40 EST


2016-10-25 19:43 GMT+08:00 Radim KrÄmÃÅ <rkrcmar@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> 2016-10-25 07:39+0800, Wanpeng Li:
>> 2016-10-24 23:27 GMT+08:00 Radim KrÄmÃÅ <rkrcmar@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>>> 2016-10-24 17:09+0200, Paolo Bonzini:
>>>> On 24/10/2016 17:03, Radim KrÄmÃÅ wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> Reviewed-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx>
>>>>
>>>> Go ahead, squash it into 5/5 and commit to kvm/queue. :)
>>>
>>> Did that, thanks.
>>>
>>> Wanpeng, the code is now under your name so please check it and/or
>>> complain.
>>
>> This patch 6/5 incurred regressions.
>>
>> - The latency of the periodic mode which is emulated by VMX preemption
>> is almost the same as periodic mode which is emulated by hrtimer.
>
> Hm, what numbers are you getting?
>
> When I ran the test with the original series, then it actually had worse
> results with the VMX preemption than it did with the hrimer:
>
> hlt average latency = 1464151
> pause average latency = 1467605
>
> htl tests the hrtimer, pause tests the VMX preemption. I just replaced
> "hlt" with "pause" in the assembly loop.
>
> The worse result was because the VMX preemption period was computed
> incorrectly -- it was being added to now(). Some time passes between
> the expiration and reading of now(), so this time was extending the
> period while it shouldn't have.
>
> If I run the test with [6/5], it gets sane numbers:
>
> hlt average latency = 1465107
> pause average latency = 1465093
>
> The numbers are sane bacause the test is not computing latency (= how
> long after the timer should have fired have we received the interrupt)
> -- it is computing the duration of the period in cycles, which is much
> better right now.
>
>> - The oneshot mode test of kvm-unit-tests/apic_timer_latency.flat almost fail.
>
> Oops, silly mistake -- apic_timer_expired() was in the 'else' branch in
> [5/5] and I didn't invert the condition after moving it.
>
> diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c b/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c
> index 6244988418be..d7e74c8ec8ca 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/kvm/lapic.c
> @@ -1354,8 +1354,8 @@ static void start_sw_period(struct kvm_lapic *apic)
> return;
>
> if (apic_lvtt_oneshot(apic) &&
> - ktime_after(apic->lapic_timer.target_expiration,
> - apic->lapic_timer.timer.base->get_time())) {
> + !ktime_after(apic->lapic_timer.target_expiration,
> + apic->lapic_timer.timer.base->get_time())) {
> apic_timer_expired(apic);
> return;
> }
>
> Paolo, can you squash that?

It seems that squash is impossible since the dependency of current
kvm/queue(KVM: x86: use ktime_get instead of seeking the
hrtimer_clock_base), I will send out a separate patch to fix this.

Regards,
Wanpeng Li