Re: [PATCH RFC 0/7] KVM: nVMX: enlightened VMCS initial implementation

Paolo Bonzini
2017-12-19T12:42:11Z

On 18/12/2017 18:17, Vitaly Kuznetsov wrote:
> The original author of these patches does no longer work at Red Hat, I
> agreed to take this over and send upstream. Here is his original
> description:
>
> "Makes KVM implement the enlightened VMCS feature per Hyper-V TLFS 5.0b.
> I've measured about %5 improvement in cost of a nested VM exit (Hyper-V
> enabled Windows Server 2016 nested in KVM)."

Can you try reproducing this and see how much a simple CPUID loop costs in:

* Hyper-V on Hyper-V (with enlightened VMCS, as a proxy for a full
implementation including the clean fields mask)

* Hyper-V on KVM, with and without enlightened VMCS

The latest kvm/queue branch already cut a lot of the cost of a nested VM
exit (from ~22000 to ~14000 clock cycles for KVM on KVM), so we could
also see if Hyper-V needs shadowing of more fields.

> This is just an initial implementation. By leveraging clean fields mask
> we can further improve performance. I'm also interested in implementing
> the other part of the feature: consuming enlightened VMCS when KVM is
> running on top of Hyper-V.

I'm also interested in consuming enlightened VMCS on Hyper-V if that can
provide better performance for KVM on Azure.

Paolo