Re: [PATCH] x86/hvm: accelerate IO intercept handling

[Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@amd.com>]

Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 05/03/2010 14:36, "Andre Przywara" <andre.przywara@amd.com> wrote:
> 
>> I simply boot tested both versions and ran some simple benchmarks.
>> A micro benchmark (hammering an I/O port in a tight loop) shows a
>> significant performance improvement (down to 66% of the time needed to
>> handle the intercept on a K8, measured in the guest with TSC).
>> Even with reading a 1GB file from an emulated IDE harddisk (Dom0 cached)
>> I could get a  4-5% improvement.
>> We found some guests (e.g. the TCP stack in some Windows version) which
>> exercise the PM-Timer I/O port (0x1F48) very often (multiple 10,000
>> times per second), these workloads also benefit from this patch.
> 
> By how much? I mean, the microbenchmark and 5% speedup on our poor-man's IO
> path are not very interesting.
Educated estimation: Sysmark productivity should give about 0.5%, 
Passmark TCP localhost transfer on Windows 2008R2 should improve about 5%.

 > Unless the speedup on the only
> possibly-interesting workload you mention is significant, this whole
> optimisation seems unnecessary.
Actually it is missing enablement. What is the purpose of going through 
the emulator (mapping and walking guest page tables, reading guest 
instruction memory, decoding x86 code) when you don't have to? KVM is 
implementing this for quite some time now.

And, after all, low hanging fruits are growing higher nowadays, so I'd 
consider an even modest performance improvement for _every_ machine by 
just a software patch a valuable thing.

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 448 3567 12
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