Besides the fact that we did not have that for the current supported
boards, that makes sense for this new, virtualized mode, that is meant
to be run on top of full-fledged x86 64 CPUs.
By having xAPIC mode access only, Jailhouse has to intercept those MMIO
reads and writes, in order to examine what they do and arbitrate if it's
safe or not (e.g. not all values are accepted to ICR register). This
means that we can't run away from having a VM-exit event for each and
every access to APIC memory region and this impacts the latency the
guest OS observes over bare metal a lot.
When in x2APIC mode, Jailhouse does not require VM-exits for MSR
accesses other that writes to the ICR register, so the latency the guest
observes is reduced to almost zero.
Here are some outputs of the the command line
$ sudo ./tools/jailhouse cell stats tiny-demo
on a Jailhouse's root cell console, for one of the Zephyr demos using
LOAPIC timers, left for a couple of seconds:
Statistics for tiny-demo cell (x2APIC root, x2APIC inmate)
COUNTER SUM PER SEC
vmexits_total 7 0
vmexits_management 3 0
vmexits_cr 2 0
vmexits_cpuid 1 0
vmexits_msr 1 0
vmexits_exception 0 0
vmexits_hypercall 0 0
vmexits_mmio 0 0
vmexits_pio 0 0
vmexits_xapic 0 0
vmexits_xsetbv 0 0
Statistics for tiny-demo cell (xAPIC root, xAPIC inmate)
COUNTER SUM PER SEC
vmexits_total 4087 40
vmexits_xapic 4080 40
vmexits_management 3 0
vmexits_cr 2 0
vmexits_cpuid 1 0
vmexits_msr 1 0
vmexits_exception 0 0
vmexits_hypercall 0 0
vmexits_mmio 0 0
vmexits_pio 0 0
vmexits_xsetbv 0 0
Statistics for tiny-demo cell (xAPIC root, x2APIC inmate)
COUNTER SUM PER SEC
vmexits_total 4087 40
vmexits_msr 4080 40
vmexits_management 3 0
vmexits_cr 2 0
vmexits_cpuid 1 0
vmexits_exception 0 0
vmexits_hypercall 0 0
vmexits_mmio 0 0
vmexits_pio 0 0
vmexits_xapic 0 0
vmexits_xsetbv 0 0
See that under x2APIC mode on both Jailhouse/root-cell and guest, the
interruptions from the hypervisor are minimal. That is not the case when
Jailhouse is on xAPIC mode, though. Note also that, as a plus, x2APIC
accesses on the guest will map to xAPIC MMIO on the hypervisor just
fine.
Signed-off-by: Gustavo Lima Chaves <gustavo.lima.chaves@intel.com>
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