kvm: better MWAIT emulation for guests

Guests that are heavy on futexes end up IPI'ing each other a lot. That
can lead to significant slowdowns and latency increase for those guests
when running within KVM.

If only a single guest is needed on a host, we have a lot of spare host
CPU time we can throw at the problem. Modern CPUs implement a feature
called "MWAIT" which allows guests to wake up sleeping remote CPUs without
an IPI - thus without an exit - at the expense of never going out of guest
context.

The decision whether this is something sensible to use should be up to the
VM admin, so to user space. We can however allow MWAIT execution on systems
that support it properly hardware wise.

This patch adds a CAP to user space and a KVM cpuid leaf to indicate
availability of native MWAIT execution. With that enabled, the worst a
guest can do is waste as many cycles as a "jmp ." would do, so it's not
a privilege problem.

We consciously do *not* expose the feature in our CPUID bitmap, as most
people will want to benefit from sleeping vCPUs to allow for over commit.

Reported-by: "Gabriel L. Somlo" <gsomlo@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
[agraf: fix amd, change commit message]
Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/linux/kvm.h b/include/uapi/linux/kvm.h
index 3c168b6fd74b..e43906b95d9f 100644
--- a/include/uapi/linux/kvm.h
+++ b/include/uapi/linux/kvm.h
@@ -893,6 +893,7 @@ struct kvm_ppc_resize_hpt {
 #define KVM_CAP_S390_GS 140
 #define KVM_CAP_S390_AIS 141
 #define KVM_CAP_SPAPR_TCE_VFIO 142
+#define KVM_CAP_X86_GUEST_MWAIT 143
 
 #ifdef KVM_CAP_IRQ_ROUTING