Re: [Xen-devel] OVMF very slow on AMD

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 28/07/16 16:17, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
> On 07/28/2016 06:54 AM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>> On 28/07/16 11:43, George Dunlap wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Anthony PERARD
>>> <anthony.perard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 03:45:23PM -0400, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
>>>>> On 07/27/2016 07:35 AM, Anthony PERARD wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 12:08:04PM +0100, Anthony PERARD wrote:
>>>>>>> I can try to describe how OVMF is setting up the memory.
>>>>>> From the start of the day:
>>>>>> setup gdt
>>>>>> cr0 = 0x40000023
>>>>> I think this is slightly odd, with bit 30 (cache disable) set. I'd
>>>>> suspect that this would affect both Intel and AMD though.
>>>>>
>>>>> Can you try clearing this bit?
>>>> That works...
>>>>
>>>> I wonder why it does not appear to affect Intel or KVM.
>>> Are those bits hard-coded, or are they set based on the hardware
>>> that's available?
>>>
>>> Is it possible that the particular combination of CPUID bits presented
>>> by Xen on AMD are causing a different value to be written?
>>>
>>> Or is it possible that the cache disable bit is being ignored (by Xen)
>>> on Intel and KVM?
>> If a guest has no hardware, then it has no reason to actually disable
>> caches.  We should have logic to catch this an avoid actually disabling
>> caches when the guest asks for it.
> Is this really safe to do? Can't a guest decide to disable cache to
> avoid having to deal with coherency in SW?

What SW coherency issue do you think can be solved with disabling the cache?

x86 has strict ordering of writes and reads with respect to each other. 
The only case which can be out of order is reads promoted ahead of
unaliasing writes.

>
> As far as Intel vs AMD implementation in Xen, we have vmx_handle_cd()
> but no corresponding SVM code. Could it be that we need to set gPAT, for
> example?

A better approach would be to find out why ovmf insists on disabling
caches at all.  Even if we optimise the non-PCI-device case in the
hypervisor, a passthrough case will still run like treacle if caches are
disabled.

~Andrew

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