KVM: x86/pmu: Introduce pmc->is_paused to reduce the call time of perf interfaces
Based on our observations, after any vm-exit associated with vPMU, there are at least two or more perf interfaces to be called for guest counter emulation, such as perf_event_{pause, read_value, period}(), and each one will {lock, unlock} the same perf_event_ctx. The frequency of calls becomes more severe when guest use counters in a multiplexed manner. Holding a lock once and completing the KVM request operations in the perf context would introduce a set of impractical new interfaces. So we can further optimize the vPMU implementation by avoiding repeated calls to these interfaces in the KVM context for at least one pattern: After we call perf_event_pause() once, the event will be disabled and its internal count will be reset to 0. So there is no need to pause it again or read its value. Once the event is paused, event period will not be updated until the next time it's resumed or reprogrammed. And there is also no need to call perf_event_period twice for a non-running counter, considering the perf_event for a running counter is never paused. Based on this implementation, for the following common usage of sampling 4 events using perf on a 4u8g guest: echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog echo 25 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_cpu_time_max_percent echo 10000 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_max_sample_rate echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_cpu_time_max_percent for i in `seq 1 1 10` do taskset -c 0 perf record \ -e cpu-cycles -e instructions -e branch-instructions -e cache-misses \ /root/br_instr a done the average latency of the guest NMI handler is reduced from 37646.7 ns to 32929.3 ns (~1.14x speed up) on the Intel ICX server. Also, in addition to collecting more samples, no loss of sampling accuracy was observed compared to before the optimization. Signed-off-by: Like Xu <likexu@tencent.com> Message-Id: <20210728120705.6855-1-likexu@tencent.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
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