Re: [PATCH v2 5/6] x86/xen: Add a Xen-specific sync_core() implementation

[Boris Ostrovsky]

On 12/02/2016 06:44 AM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 02/12/16 00:35, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> On Xen PV, CPUID is likely to trap, and Xen hypercalls aren't
>> guaranteed to serialize.  (Even CPUID isn't *really* guaranteed to
>> serialize on Xen PV, but, in practice, any trap it generates will
>> serialize.)
> Well, Xen will enabled CPUID Faulting wherever it can, which is
> realistically all IvyBridge hardware and newer.
>
> All hypercalls are a privilege change to cpl0.  I'd hope this condition
> is serialising, but I can't actually find any documentation proving or
> disproving this.
>
>> On my laptop, CPUID(eax=1, ecx=0) is ~83ns and IRET-to-self is
>> ~110ns.  But Xen PV will trap CPUID if possible, so IRET-to-self
>> should end up being a nice speedup.
>>
>> Cc: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx>

Executing CPUID in an HVM guest is quite expensive since it will cause a
VMEXIT. (And that should be true for any hypervisor, at least on Intel.
On AMD it's configurable)

-boris