KVM: arm/arm64: Avoid timer save/restore in vcpu entry/exit

We don't need to save and restore the hardware timer state and examine
if it generates interrupts on on every entry/exit to the guest.  The
timer hardware is perfectly capable of telling us when it has expired
by signaling interrupts.

When taking a vtimer interrupt in the host, we don't want to mess with
the timer configuration, we just want to forward the physical interrupt
to the guest as a virtual interrupt.  We can use the split priority drop
and deactivate feature of the GIC to do this, which leaves an EOI'ed
interrupt active on the physical distributor, making sure we don't keep
taking timer interrupts which would prevent the guest from running.  We
can then forward the physical interrupt to the VM using the HW bit in
the LR of the GIC, like we do already, which lets the guest directly
deactivate both the physical and virtual timer simultaneously, allowing
the timer hardware to exit the VM and generate a new physical interrupt
when the timer output is again asserted later on.

We do need to capture this state when migrating VCPUs between physical
CPUs, however, which we use the vcpu put/load functions for, which are
called through preempt notifiers whenever the thread is scheduled away
from the CPU or called directly if we return from the ioctl to
userspace.

One caveat is that we have to save and restore the timer state in both
kvm_timer_vcpu_[put/load] and kvm_timer_[schedule/unschedule], because
we can have the following flows:

  1. kvm_vcpu_block
  2. kvm_timer_schedule
  3. schedule
  4. kvm_timer_vcpu_put (preempt notifier)
  5. schedule (vcpu thread gets scheduled back)
  6. kvm_timer_vcpu_load (preempt notifier)
  7. kvm_timer_unschedule

And a version where we don't actually call schedule:

  1. kvm_vcpu_block
  2. kvm_timer_schedule
  7. kvm_timer_unschedule

Since kvm_timer_[schedule/unschedule] may not be followed by put/load,
but put/load also may be called independently, we call the timer
save/restore functions from both paths.  Since they rely on the loaded
flag to never save/restore when unnecessary, this doesn't cause any
harm, and we ensure that all invokations of either set of functions work
as intended.

An added benefit beyond not having to read and write the timer sysregs
on every entry and exit is that we no longer have to actively write the
active state to the physical distributor, because we configured the
irq for the vtimer to only get a priority drop when handling the
interrupt in the GIC driver (we called irq_set_vcpu_affinity()), and
the interrupt stays active after firing on the host.

Reviewed-by: Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoffer Dall <cdall@linaro.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions