[Xen-devel] Difference between normal Dom0 and PVH Dom0

[openlui <openlui@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,  all:

    From the article [1] and xen-colors picture from Brendan Gergg's blog [2], I have some understanding and question about PVH Dom0 as follows:

    1. Even after pvops has been support in Linux mainline kernel, current XEN dom0 is still a "Full PV" domain (I will call it as "normal Dom0" in this mail), am I right?

    2. The normal Dom0 cannot take advantage of the Hardware visualization extensions like HVM Domain, including privileged instructions and pagetables. I am wondering how much performance impact it will have compared with PVH and HVM Domain, and does it means that the technology such as shadow page table is needed for Dom0?

    3. For the normal Dom0 running with x86_64, because of the elimination of segmentation limit, each system call in Dom0 will bounce up into Xen and then context-switch to the Dom0 kernel, and will cause frequent flushing of the TLB. Is this also applied to  x86_64 cpus from other vendors other than AMD? How can I verify it? It seems that the problem will have big impact for Dom0 performance, does it?

    4. PVH Dom0 can improve the maintainability of pvops related code of Xen as well as improve the performance of normal Dom0. I am wondering if there are other aspects of performance PVH Dom0 can improve besides the 2 and 3 mentioned above.

[1] https://blog.xenproject.org/2012/10/31/the-paravirtualization-spectrum-part-2-from-poles-to-a-spectrum/

[2] http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2014/xen-colors.png

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