Re: [PATCH v8 7/7] KVM: x86: Expose TSC offset controls to userspace

From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
To: Oliver Upton <oupton@google.com>,
	kvm@vger.kernel.org,  kvmarm@lists.cs.columbia.edu
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>,
	Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>,
	 Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org>, Peter Shier <pshier@google.com>,
	Jim Mattson <jmattson@google.com>,
	David Matlack <dmatlack@google.com>,
	Ricardo Koller <ricarkol@google.com>,
	Jing Zhang <jingzhangos@google.com>,
	Raghavendra Rao Anata <rananta@google.com>,
	James Morse <james.morse@arm.com>,
	Alexandru Elisei <alexandru.elisei@arm.com>,
	Suzuki K Poulose <suzuki.poulose@arm.com>,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org,
	Andrew Jones <drjones@redhat.com>, Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>,
	Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 7/7] KVM: x86: Expose TSC offset controls to userspace
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:02:44 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <8622beb5a721ae888f21c2e7c74fae23b2e2ccb6.camel@infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210916181538.968978-8-oupton@google.com>

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On Thu, 2021-09-16 at 18:15 +0000, Oliver Upton wrote:
> To date, VMM-directed TSC synchronization and migration has been a bit
> messy. KVM has some baked-in heuristics around TSC writes to infer if
> the VMM is attempting to synchronize. This is problematic, as it depends
> on host userspace writing to the guest's TSC within 1 second of the last
> write.
> 
> A much cleaner approach to configuring the guest's views of the TSC is to
> simply migrate the TSC offset for every vCPU. Offsets are idempotent,
> and thus not subject to change depending on when the VMM actually
> reads/writes values from/to KVM. The VMM can then read the TSC once with
> KVM_GET_CLOCK to capture a (realtime, host_tsc) pair at the instant when
> the guest is paused.
> 
> Cc: David Matlack <dmatlack@google.com>
> Cc: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
> Signed-off-by: Oliver Upton <oupton@google.com>
> ---
>  Documentation/virt/kvm/devices/vcpu.rst |  57 ++++++++++++
>  arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_host.h         |   1 +
>  arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm.h         |   4 +
>  arch/x86/kvm/x86.c                      | 110 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  4 files changed, 172 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/Documentation/virt/kvm/devices/vcpu.rst b/Documentation/virt/kvm/devices/vcpu.rst
> index 2acec3b9ef65..3b399d727c11 100644
> --- a/Documentation/virt/kvm/devices/vcpu.rst
> +++ b/Documentation/virt/kvm/devices/vcpu.rst
> @@ -161,3 +161,60 @@ Specifies the base address of the stolen time structure for this VCPU. The
>  base address must be 64 byte aligned and exist within a valid guest memory
>  region. See Documentation/virt/kvm/arm/pvtime.rst for more information
>  including the layout of the stolen time structure.
> +
> +4. GROUP: KVM_VCPU_TSC_CTRL
> +===========================
> +
> +:Architectures: x86
> +
> +4.1 ATTRIBUTE: KVM_VCPU_TSC_OFFSET
> +
> +:Parameters: 64-bit unsigned TSC offset
> +
> +Returns:
> +
> +	 ======= ======================================
> +	 -EFAULT Error reading/writing the provided
> +		 parameter address.
> +	 -ENXIO  Attribute not supported
> +	 ======= ======================================
> +
> +Specifies the guest's TSC offset relative to the host's TSC. The guest's
> +TSC is then derived by the following equation:
> +
> +  guest_tsc = host_tsc + KVM_VCPU_TSC_OFFSET

This isn't true. The guest TSC also depends on the *scaling* factor.

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