• Marcelo Tosatti's avatar
    KVM: x86: add option to advance tscdeadline hrtimer expiration · d0659d94
    Marcelo Tosatti authored
    For the hrtimer which emulates the tscdeadline timer in the guest,
    add an option to advance expiration, and busy spin on VM-entry waiting
    for the actual expiration time to elapse.
    
    This allows achieving low latencies in cyclictest (or any scenario
    which requires strict timing regarding timer expiration).
    
    Reduces average cyclictest latency from 12us to 8us
    on Core i5 desktop.
    
    Note: this option requires tuning to find the appropriate value
    for a particular hardware/guest combination. One method is to measure the
    average delay between apic_timer_fn and VM-entry.
    Another method is to start with 1000ns, and increase the value
    in say 500ns increments until avg cyclictest numbers stop decreasing.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMarcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
    d0659d94
x86.h 4.15 KB