Re: [PATCH 0/2] KVM: x86: Fix incorrect VM-exit profiling

Sean Christopherson
2022-05-18T15:34:50Z

On Wed, May 18, 2022, Suleiman Souhlal wrote:
> On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 4:30 AM Wei Zhang <zhanwei@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Please don't top-post. From https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette:
> >
> > Ah, I didn't know this should be avoided. Thanks for the info!
> >
> > > My preference would be to find a more complete, KVM-specific solution. The
> > > profiling stuff seems like it's a dead end, i.e. will always be flawed in some
> > > way. If this cleanup didn't require a new hypercall then I wouldn't care, but
> > > I don't love having to extend KVM's guest/host ABI for something that ideally
> > > will become obsolete sooner than later.
> >
> > I also feel that adding a new hypercall is too much here. A
> > KVM-specific solution is definitely better, and the eBPF based
> > approach you mentioned sounds like the ultimate solution (at least for
> > inspecting exit reasons).
> >
> > +Suleiman What do you think? The on-going work Sean described sounds
> > promising, perhaps we should put this patch aside for the time being.
>
> I'm ok with that.
> That said, the advantage of the current solution is that it already
> exists and is very easy to use, by anyone, without having to write any
> code. The proposed solution doesn't sound like it will be as easy.

My goal/hope is to make the eBPF approach just as easy by providing/building a
library of KVM eBPF programs in tools/ so that doing common things like profiling
VM-Exits doesn't require reinventing the wheel. And those programs could be used
(and thus implicitly tested) by KVM selftests to verify the kernel functionality.