[PATCH v3 08/11] KVM: arm: implement dirty bit mechanism for debug registers

[zhichao.huang@linaro.org (zichao)]

On 2015/7/9 19:50, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 11:24:06AM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 11:06:57AM +0100, Zhichao Huang wrote:
>>> Chazy and me are talking about how to reduce the saving/restoring
>>> overhead for debug registers.
>>> We want to add a state in hw_breakpoint.c to indicate whether the host
>>> enable any hwbrpts or not (might export a fuction that kvm can call),
>>> then we can read this state from memory instead of reading from real
>>> hardware registers, and to decide whether we need a world switch or
>>> not.
>>> Does it acceptable?
>>
>> Maybe, hard to tell without the code. There are obvious races to deal with
>> if you use variables to indicate whether resources are in use -- why not
>> just trap debug access from the host as well? Then you could keep track of
>> the "owner" in kvm and trap accesses from everybody else.
>>
> The only information we're looking for here is whether the host has
> enabled some break/watch point so that we need to disable them before
> running the guest.
> 
> Just to re-iterate, when we are about to run a guest, we have the
> following cases:
> 
> 1) Neither the host nor the guest has configured any [WB]points
> 2) Only the host has configured any [WB]points
> 3) Only the guest has configured any [WB]points
> 4) Both the host and the guest have configured any [WB]points
> 
> In case (1), KVM should enable trapping and swtich the register state on
> guest accesses.
> 
> In cases (2), (3), and (4) we must switch the register state on each
> entry/exit.
> 
> If we are to trap debug register accesses in KVM to set a flag to keep
> track of the owner (iow. has the host touched the registers) then don't
> we impose an ordering requirement of whether KVM or the breakpoint
> functionality gets initialized first, and we need to take special care
> when tearing down KVM to disable the traps?  It sounds a little complex.
> 
> I've previously suggested to simply look at the B/W control registers to
> figure out what to do.  Caching the state in memory is an optimization,
> do we even have any idea how important such an optimization is?
> 

I have a test for the overhead both in el1 and el2 on D01 board(ARMv7).

Each "MRC p14 ..." instruction cost 8 cycles, and Each "MCR p14 ..." cost 5 cycles.

A15 has 6 breakpoints and 4 watchpoints, which gives us a total of 20 registers.
and the overhead in each world switch is at least (20*8 + 20*5 = 260)cycles.


> Thanks,
> -Christoffer
>