Re: kvmclock doesn't work, help?

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 09/12/2015 22:10, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> Can we please stop making kvmclock more complex?  It's a beast right
> now, and not in a good way.  It's far too tangled with the vclock
> machinery on both the host and guest sides, the pvclock stuff is not
> well thought out (even in principle in an ABI sense), and it's never
> been clear to my what problem exactly the kvmclock stuff is supposed
> to solve.

It's supposed to solve the problem that:

- not all hosts have a working TSC

- even if they all do, virtual machines can be migrated (or
saved/restored) to a host with a different TSC frequency

- any MMIO- or PIO-based mechanism to access the current time is orders
of magnitude slower than the TSC and less precise too.

> I'm somewhat tempted to suggest that we delete kvmclock entirely and
> start over.  A correctly functioning KVM guest using TSC (i.e.
> ignoring kvmclock entirely) seems to work rather more reliably and
> considerably faster than a kvmclock guest.

If all your hosts have a working TSC and you don't do migration or
save/restore, that's a valid configuration.  It's not a good default,
however.

Paolo