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Guests that are heavy on futexes end up IPI'ing each other a lot. That can lead to significant slowdowns and latency increase for those guests when running within KVM. If only a single guest is needed on a host, we have a lot of spare host CPU time we can throw at the problem. Modern CPUs implement a feature called "MWAIT" which allows guests to wake up sleeping remote CPUs without an IPI - thus without an exit - at the expense of never going out of guest context. The decision whether this is something sensible to use should be up to the VM admin, so to user space. We can however allow MWAIT execution on systems that support it properly hardware wise. This patch adds a CAP to user space and a KVM cpuid leaf to indicate availability of native MWAIT execution. With that enabled, the worst a guest can do is waste as many cycles as a "jmp ." would do, so it's not a privilege problem. We consciously do *not* expose the feature in our CPUID bitmap, as most people will want to benefit from sleeping vCPUs to allow for over commit. Reported-by: "Gabriel L. Somlo" <gsomlo@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> [agraf: fix amd, change commit message] Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.