Dedicated instances are currently disturbed by unnecessary jitter due
to the emulated lapic timers firing on the same pCPUs where the
vCPUs reside. There is no hardware virtual timer on Intel for guest
like ARM, so both programming timer in guest and the emulated timer fires
incur vmexits. This patch tries to avoid vmexit when the emulated timer
fires, at least in dedicated instance scenario when nohz_full is enabled.
In that case, the emulated timers can be offload to the nearest busy
housekeeping cpus since APICv has been found for several years in server
processors. The guest timer interrupt can then be injected via posted interrupts,
which are delivered by the housekeeping cpu once the emulated timer fires.
The host should tuned so that vCPUs are placed on isolated physical
processors, and with several pCPUs surplus for busy housekeeping.
If disabled mwait/hlt/pause vmexits keep the vCPUs in non-root mode,
~3% redis performance benefit can be observed on Skylake server, and the
number of external interrupt vmexits drops substantially. Without patch
VM-EXIT Samples Samples% Time% Min Time Max Time Avg time
EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT 42916 49.43% 39.30% 0.47us 106.09us 0.71us ( +- 1.09% )
While with patch:
VM-EXIT Samples Samples% Time% Min Time Max Time Avg time
EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT 6871 9.29% 2.96% 0.44us 57.88us 0.72us ( +- 4.02% )
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@redhat.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@tencent.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
0c5f81dad4