• Will Auld's avatar
    KVM: x86: Emulate IA32_TSC_ADJUST MSR · ba904635
    Will Auld authored
    CPUID.7.0.EBX[1]=1 indicates IA32_TSC_ADJUST MSR 0x3b is supported
    
    Basic design is to emulate the MSR by allowing reads and writes to a guest
    vcpu specific location to store the value of the emulated MSR while adding
    the value to the vmcs tsc_offset. In this way the IA32_TSC_ADJUST value will
    be included in all reads to the TSC MSR whether through rdmsr or rdtsc. This
    is of course as long as the "use TSC counter offsetting" VM-execution control
    is enabled as well as the IA32_TSC_ADJUST control.
    
    However, because hardware will only return the TSC + IA32_TSC_ADJUST +
    vmsc tsc_offset for a guest process when it does and rdtsc (with the correct
    settings) the value of our virtualized IA32_TSC_ADJUST must be stored in one
    of these three locations. The argument against storing it in the actual MSR
    is performance. This is likely to be seldom used while the save/restore is
    required on every transition. IA32_TSC_ADJUST was created as a way to solve
    some issues with writing TSC itself so that is not an option either.
    
    The remaining option, defined above as our solution has the problem of
    returning incorrect vmcs tsc_offset values (unless we intercept and fix, not
    done here) as mentioned above. However, more problematic is that storing the
    data in vmcs tsc_offset will have a different semantic effect on the system
    than does using the actual MSR. This is illustrated in the following example:
    
    The hypervisor set the IA32_TSC_ADJUST, then the guest sets it and a guest
    process performs a rdtsc. In this case the guest process will get
    TSC + IA32_TSC_ADJUST_hyperviser + vmsc tsc_offset including
    IA32_TSC_ADJUST_guest. While the total system semantics changed the semantics
    as seen by the guest do not and hence this will not cause a problem.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarWill Auld <will.auld@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMarcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
    ba904635
kvm_host.h 28.6 KB