Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Always save/restore performance counters when HVM guest switching VCPU

[Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@xxxxxxxxxx>]

----- JBeulich@xxxxxxxx wrote:

> >>> On 04.03.13 at 13:42, George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 8:49 PM,  <suravee.suthikulpanit@xxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >> From: Suravee Suthikulpanit <suravee.suthikulpanit@xxxxxxx>
> >>
> >> Currently, the performance counter registers are saved/restores
> >> when the HVM guest switchs VCPUs only if they are running.
> >> However, PERF has one check where it writes the MSR and read back
> >> the value to check if the MSR is working.  This has shown to fails
> >> the check if the VCPU is moved in between rdmsr and wrmsr and
> >> resulting in the values are different.
> > 
> > Many moons ago (circa 2005) when I used performance counters, I
> found
> > that adding them to the save/restore path added a non-neligible
> > overhead -- something like 5% slow-down.  Do you have any reason to
> > believe this is no longer the case?  Have you done any benchmarks
> > before and after?

I was doing some VPMU tracing a couple of weeks ago and by looking at 
trace timestamps I think I saw about 4000 cycles on VPMU save and 
~9000 cycles on restore. Don't remember what it was percentage-wise of
a whole context switch.

This was on Intel.

-boris


> > 
> > If there is a performance slow-down, you may have to implement
> > something like the "lazy FPU" save/restore, where you remove access
> to
> > the VPMU MSRs to detect that the guest is accessing them.
> 
> Suravee,
> 
> without addressing George's concerns, I don't think you can
> expect the patch to be committed (the more that Boris, along
> with his ack, also asked to adjust the description).
> 
> Jan
> 
> 
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