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Re: [PATCH] xen/arm: Introduce pmu_access parameter





On 01/09/2021 14:10, Bertrand Marquis wrote:
Hi Julien,

Hi Bertrand,


On 1 Sep 2021, at 13:55, Julien Grall <julien@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

On 01/09/2021 13:43, Michal Orzel wrote:
Introduce new Xen command line parameter called "pmu_access".
The default value is "trap": Xen traps PMU accesses.
In case of setting pmu_access to "native", Xen does not trap
PMU accesses allowing all the guests to access PMU registers.
However, guests cannot make use of PMU overflow interrupts as
PMU uses PPI which Xen cannot route to guests.
This option is only intended for development and testing purposes.
Do not use this in production system.
I am afraid your option is not safe even in development system as a vCPU may 
move between pCPUs.

However, even if we restricted the use to pinned vCPU *and* dedicated pCPU, I 
am not convinced that exposing an half backed PMU (the overflow interrupt would 
not work) to the guest is the right solution. This likely means the guest OS 
would need to be modified and therefore the usage of this option is fairly 
limited.

So I think the first steps are:
  1) Make the PPI work. There was some attempt in the past for it on xen-devel. 
You could have a look.
  2) Provide PMU bindings

With that in place, we can discuss how to expose the PMU even if it is unsafe 
in some conditions.

With those limitations, using the PMU to monitor the system performances or on 
some specific use cases is still really useful.
We are using that to do some benchmarks of Xen or of some applications to 
compare the behaviour to a native system or
analyse the performances of Xen itself (hypercalls,context switch …etc)

I understand this is useful for some setup and I am not trying to say we should not have a way to expose the PMU (even unsafely) in upstream. However, I think the option as it stands is too wide (this should be a per domain knob) and we should properly expose the PMU (interrupts, bindings...).


The steps you are mentioning do make sense but using the PMU without those 
knowing the limitations is also very useful.

Right, this would require a lot more work than what I wrote before.

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall



 


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