Re: [RFC] KVM: x86: Allow userspace exit on HLT and MWAIT, else yield on MWAIT

[Alexander Graf]

On 18.09.23 13:10, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2023-09-18 at 11:41 +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:
> > IIUC you want to do work in a user space vCPU thread when the guest vCPU
> > is idle. As you pointed out above, KVM can not actually do much about
> > MWAIT: It basically busy loops and hogs the CPU.
> Well.. I suspect what I *really* want is a decent way to emulate MWAIT
> properly and let it actually sleep. Or failing that, to declare that we
> can actually change the guest-visible experience when those guests are
> migrated to KVM, and take away MWAIT completely.
>
> > The typical flow I would expect for "work in a vCPU thread" is:
> >
> > 0) vCPU runs. HLT/MWAIT is directly exposed to guest.
> > 1) vCPU exits. Creates deferred work. Enables HLT/MWAIT trapping.
> That can happen, but it may also be a separate I/O thread which
> receives an eventfd notification and finds that there is now work to be
> done. If that work can be fairly much instantaneous, it can be done
> immediately. Else it gets deferred to what we Linux hackers might think
> of as a workqueue.
>
> If all the vCPUs are in HLT when the work queue becomes non-empty, we'd
> need to prod them *all* to change their exit-on-{HLT,MWAIT} status when
> work becomes available, just in case one of them becomes idle and can
> process the work "for free" using idle cycles.
>
> > 2) vCPU runs again
> > 3) vCPU calls HLT/MWAIT. We exit to user space to finish work from 1
> > 4) vCPU runs again without HLT/MWAIT trapping
> >
> > That means on top (or instead?) of the bits you have below that indicate
> > "Should I exit to user space?", what you really need are bits that do
> > what enable_cap(KVM_CAP_X86_DISABLE_EXITS) does in light-weight: Disable
> > HLT/MWAIT trapping temporarily.
> If I do it that way, yes. A lightweight way to enable/disable the exits
> even to kernel would be a nice to have. But it's a trade-off. For HLT
> you'd get lower latency re-entering the vCPU at a cost of much higher
> latency processing work if the vCPU was *already* in HLT.
>
> We probably would want to stop burning power in the MWAIT loop though,
> and let the pCPU sit in the guest in MWAIT if there really is nothing
> else to do.
>
> We're experimenting with various permutations.
>
> > Also, please keep in mind that you still would need a fallback mechanism
> > to run your "deferred work" even when the guest does not call HLT/MWAIT,
> > like a regular timer in your main thread.
> Yeah. In that case I think the ideal answer is that we let the kernel
> scheduler sort it out. I was thinking of a model where we have I/O (or
> workqueue) threads in *addition* to the userspace exits on idle. The
> separate threads own the work (and a number of them are woken according
> to the queue depth), and idle vCPUs *opportunistically* process work
> items on top of that.
>
> That approach alone would work fine with the existing HLT scheduling;
> it's just MWAIT which is a pain because yield() doesn't really do much
> (but as noted, it's better than *nothing*).
>
> > On top of all this, I'm not sure it's more efficient to do the trap to
> > the vCPU thread compared to just creating a separate real thread. Your
> > main problem is the emulatability of MWAIT because that leaves "no time"
> > to do deferred work. But then again, if your deferred work is so complex
> > that it needs more than a few ms (which you can always steal from the
> > vCPU thread, especiall with yield()), you'll need to start implementing
> > time slicing of that work in user space next - and basically rebuild
> > your own scheduler there. Ugh.
> >
> > IMHO the real core value of this idea would be in a vcpu_run bit that on
> > VCPU_RUN can toggle between HLT/MWAIT intercept on and off. The actual
> > trap to user space, you're most likely better off with a separate thread.
> No, that's very much not the point. The problem is that yield() doesn't
> work well enough — and isn't designed or guaranteed to do anything in
> particular for most cases. It's better than *nothing* but we want the
> opportunity to do the actual work right there in the *loop* of the
> guest bouncing through MWAIT.


The problem with MWAIT is that you don't really know when it's done.

You could find out by making MONITOR'ed pages(!) read-only so you can 
wake up any target vCPU that's in MWAIT, but that's considerably 
expensive if you want to do it well.

You could also burn one VM/system wide CPU that does nothing but waits 
for changes in any MONITOR'ed cache line. Doable with less power 
consumption if you use TSX I guess. But probably not what you want either.

Another alternative would be to make guests PV aware, so they understand 
you don't actually do MWAIT and give you a hypercall every time they 
modify whatever anyone would want to monitor (such as 
thread_info->flags). But that requires new guest kernels. I don't think 
you want to wait for that :).

So in a nutshell, emulating MWAIT properly is just super difficult. If 
you have even the remotest chance to get away with doing HLT instead, 
I'd take that. In that model, an I/O thread that schedules over idle 
threads becomes natural.


Alex





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