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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2 0/4] Expose HW APIC virtualization support to HVM guests



On 03/11/2014 07:00 AM, David Vrabel wrote:
On 11/03/14 03:53, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
Version 2:
* Added ability to specify hypervisor CPUID leaves in config file (this requires
   new sysctl)
* Use 2 bits to indicate what is supported --- one for APIC memory access and 
the
   other for x2APIC. Still not sure whether virtual interrupt delivery should be
   exposed as well.



HVM guests running on HW that supports HW APIC virtualization features
(APIC-register virtualization, virtual interrupt delivery, etc) may
want to use APIC instead of hvm_pirqs. Since we are not guaranteed to
have these features on VMX (for example, there is a boot option to
turn it off) and there is no such support on SVM we need to make the
guest aware that its APIC accesses may not be so bad.

CPUID seems to be a good way to provide this info to the guest.
It's seems a bit odd to use a Xen-specific (?) CPUID leaf to report that
the guest should use a bare-metal feature -- that's the default
behaviour of a HVM guest.

I think it makes more sense to hint that the guest that a PV alternate
is available and then omit this hint if using a virtualized APIC
performs better.

That's what I originally thought too.

However, I don't think we can do this since we don't know guest's features. For example, we can have a guest that doesn't have APIC support (no CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC). If we don't provide XENFEAT_hvm_pirqs (which is essentially what this CPUID bit is trying to suggest that the guest doesn't use) then I am not sure how well this will work out.

More generally, having one feature doesn't necessarily makes another feature disappear (and this is true in this case).

Thanks.
-boris

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