We really do not need two paravirt/x86_init_ops functions which are
called in two consecutive source lines. Move the only user of
post_allocator_init into the already existing pagetable_setup_done
function.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Xiaohui Xin and some other folks at Intel have been looking into what's
behind the performance hit of paravirt_ops when running native.
It appears that the hit is entirely due to the paravirtualized
spinlocks introduced by:
| commit 8efcbab674
| Date: Mon Jul 7 12:07:51 2008 -0700
|
| paravirt: introduce a "lock-byte" spinlock implementation
The extra call/return in the spinlock path is somehow
causing an increase in the cycles/instruction of somewhere around 2-7%
(seems to vary quite a lot from test to test). The working theory is
that the CPU's pipeline is getting upset about the
call->call->locked-op->return->return, and seems to be failing to
speculate (though I haven't seen anything definitive about the precise
reasons). This doesn't entirely make sense, because the performance
hit is also visible on unlock and other operations which don't involve
locked instructions. But spinlock operations clearly swamp all the
other pvops operations, even though I can't imagine that they're
nearly as common (there's only a .05% increase in instructions
executed).
If I disable just the pv-spinlock calls, my tests show that pvops is
identical to non-pvops performance on native (my measurements show that
it is actually about .1% faster, but Xiaohui shows a .05% slowdown).
Summary of results, averaging 10 runs of the "mmperf" test, using a
no-pvops build as baseline:
nopv Pv-nospin Pv-spin
CPU cycles 100.00% 99.89% 102.18%
instructions 100.00% 100.10% 100.15%
CPI 100.00% 99.79% 102.03%
cache ref 100.00% 100.84% 100.28%
cache miss 100.00% 90.47% 88.56%
cache miss rate 100.00% 89.72% 88.31%
branches 100.00% 99.93% 100.04%
branch miss 100.00% 103.66% 107.72%
branch miss rt 100.00% 103.73% 107.67%
wallclock 100.00% 99.90% 102.20%
The clear effect here is that the 2% increase in CPI is
directly reflected in the final wallclock time.
(The other interesting effect is that the more ops are
out of line calls via pvops, the lower the cache access
and miss rates. Not too surprising, but it suggests that
the non-pvops kernel is over-inlined. On the flipside,
the branch misses go up correspondingly...)
So, what's the fix?
Paravirt patching turns all the pvops calls into direct calls, so
_spin_lock etc do end up having direct calls. For example, the compiler
generated code for paravirtualized _spin_lock is:
<_spin_lock+0>: mov %gs:0xb4c8,%rax
<_spin_lock+9>: incl 0xffffffffffffe044(%rax)
<_spin_lock+15>: callq *0xffffffff805a5b30
<_spin_lock+22>: retq
The indirect call will get patched to:
<_spin_lock+0>: mov %gs:0xb4c8,%rax
<_spin_lock+9>: incl 0xffffffffffffe044(%rax)
<_spin_lock+15>: callq <__ticket_spin_lock>
<_spin_lock+20>: nop; nop /* or whatever 2-byte nop */
<_spin_lock+22>: retq
One possibility is to inline _spin_lock, etc, when building an
optimised kernel (ie, when there's no spinlock/preempt
instrumentation/debugging enabled). That will remove the outer
call/return pair, returning the instruction stream to a single
call/return, which will presumably execute the same as the non-pvops
case. The downsides arel 1) it will replicate the
preempt_disable/enable code at eack lock/unlock callsite; this code is
fairly small, but not nothing; and 2) the spinlock definitions are
already a very heavily tangled mass of #ifdefs and other preprocessor
magic, and making any changes will be non-trivial.
The other obvious answer is to disable pv-spinlocks. Making them a
separate config option is fairly easy, and it would be trivial to
enable them only when Xen is enabled (as the only non-default user).
But it doesn't really address the common case of a distro build which
is going to have Xen support enabled, and leaves the open question of
whether the native performance cost of pv-spinlocks is worth the
performance improvement on a loaded Xen system (10% saving of overall
system CPU when guests block rather than spin). Still it is a
reasonable short-term workaround.
[ Impact: fix pvops performance regression when running native ]
Analysed-by: "Xin Xiaohui" <xiaohui.xin@intel.com>
Analysed-by: "Li Xin" <xin.li@intel.com>
Analysed-by: "Nakajima Jun" <jun.nakajima@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Xen-devel <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
LKML-Reference: <4A0B62F7.5030802@goop.org>
[ fixed the help text ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
1. make sure early-allocated ptes are pinned, so they can be later
unpinned
2. don't pin pmd+pud, just make them RO
3. scatter some __inits around
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
1. make sure early-allocated ptes are pinned, so they can be later
unpinned
2. don't pin pmd+pud, just make them RO
3. scatter some __inits around
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Impact: allow preemption during lazy mmu updates
If we're in lazy mmu mode when context switching, leave
lazy mmu mode, but remember the task's state in
TIF_LAZY_MMU_UPDATES. When we resume the task, check this
flag and re-enter lazy mmu mode if its set.
This sets things up for allowing lazy mmu mode while preemptible,
though that won't actually be active until the next change.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
We need to access percpu data fairly early, so set up the percpu
registers as soon as possible. We only need to load the appropriate
segment register. We already have a GDT, but its hard to change it
early because we need to manipulate the pagetable to do so, and that
hasn't been set up yet.
Also, set the kernel stack when bringing up secondary CPUs. If we
don't they all end up sharing the same stack...
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Impact: Cleanup
Move remaining mmu-related stuff into mmu.c.
A general cleanup, and lay the groundwork for later patches.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Simple change, and eventual space saving when NR_CPUS >> nr_cpu_ids.
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
... so get xen-ops.h in agreement with xen/smp.c
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
There's no need for these functions to be accessed from outside of xen/smp.c
Signed-off-by: Alex Nixon <alex.nixon@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Note the changes from 2.6.18-xen CPU hotplugging:
A vcpu_down request from the remote admin via Xenbus both hotunplugs the
CPU, and disables it by removing it from the cpu_present map, and removing
its entry in /sys.
A vcpu_up request from the remote admin only re-enables the CPU, and does
not immediately bring the CPU up. A udev event is emitted, which can be
caught by the user if he wishes to automatically re-up CPUs when available,
or implement a more complex policy.
Signed-off-by: Alex Nixon <alex.nixon@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Ingo Molnar wrote:
> -tip testing found this build failure:
>
> arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c: In function ‘spin_time_start’:
> arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c:60: error: implicit declaration of function ‘xen_clocksource_read’
>
> i've excluded these new commits for now from tip/master - could you
> please send a delta fix against tip/x86/xen?
Make xen_clocksource_read non-static.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
For some reason I managed to miss a bunch of irq-related functions
which also need to be compiled without -pg when using ftrace. This
patch moves them into their own file, and starts a cleanup process
I've been meaning to do anyway.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
Cc: "Alex Nixon (Intern)" <Alex.Nixon@eu.citrix.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
ftrace requires certain low-level code, like spinlocks and timestamps,
to be compiled without -pg in order to avoid infinite recursion. This
patch splits out the core paravirt spinlocks and the Xen spinlocks
into separate files which can be compiled without -pg.
Also do xen/time.c while we're about it. As a result, we can now use
ftrace within a Xen domain.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
We set up entrypoints for syscall and sysenter. sysenter is only used
for 32-bit compat processes, whereas syscall can be used in by both 32
and 64-bit processes.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Cc: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Xen pushes two extra words containing the values of rcx and r11. This
pvop hook copies the words back into their appropriate registers, and
cleans them off the stack. This leaves the stack in native form, so
the normal handler can run unchanged.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Cc: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
A number of random changes to make xen/smp.c compile in 64-bit mode.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>a
Cc: Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Cc: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Move all the smp_ops setup into smp.c, allowing a lot of things to
become static.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Cc: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
add xen_timer_resume() hook.
Timer resume should be done after event channel is resumed.
add xen_arch_resume() hook when ipi becomes usable after resume.
After resume, some cpu specific resource must be reinitialized
on ia64 that can't be set by another cpu.
However available hooks is run once on only one cpu so that ipi has
to be used.
During stop_machine_run() ipi can't be used because interrupt is masked.
So add another hook after stop_machine_run().
Another approach might be use resume hook which is run by
device_resume(). However device_resume() may be executed on
suspend error recovery path.
So it is necessary to determine whether it is executed on real resume path
or error recovery path.
Signed-off-by: Isaku Yamahata <yamahata@valinux.co.jp>
Cc: Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Cc: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Rename the paravirtualized calculate_cpu_khz to calibrate_tsc.
In all cases, we actually calibrate_tsc and use that as the cpu_khz value.
Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Hecht <dhecht@vmware.com>
Cc: Dan Hecht <dhecht@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
This converts x86, x86-64, and xen to use the new helpers for
smp_call_function() and friends, and adds support for
smp_call_function_single().
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Acked-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
On resume, the vcpu timer modes will not be restored. The timer
infrastructure doesn't do this for us, since it assumes the cpus
are offline. We can just poke the other vcpus into the right mode
directly though.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
If we're using vcpu_info mapping, then make sure its restored on all
processors before relasing them from stop_machine.
The only complication is that if this fails, we can't continue because
we've already made assumptions that the mapping is available (baked in
calls to the _direct versions of the functions, for example).
Fortunately this can only happen with a 32-bit hypervisor, which may
possibly run out of mapping space. On a 64-bit hypervisor, this is a
non-issue.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
This patch implements Xen save/restore and migration.
Saving is triggered via xenbus, which is polled in
drivers/xen/manage.c. When a suspend request comes in, the kernel
prepares itself for saving by:
1 - Freeze all processes. This is primarily to prevent any
partially-completed pagetable updates from confusing the suspend
process. If CONFIG_PREEMPT isn't defined, then this isn't necessary.
2 - Suspend xenbus and other devices
3 - Stop_machine, to make sure all the other vcpus are quiescent. The
Xen tools require the domain to run its save off vcpu0.
4 - Within the stop_machine state, it pins any unpinned pgds (under
construction or destruction), performs canonicalizes various other
pieces of state (mostly converting mfns to pfns), and finally
5 - Suspend the domain
Restore reverses the steps used to save the domain, ending when all
the frozen processes are thawed.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
When saving a domain, the Xen tools need to remap all our mfns to
portable pfns. In order to remap our p2m table, it needs to know
where all its pages are, so maintain the references to the p2m table
for it to use.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Rename dummy_shared_info to xen_dummy_shared_info and make it
non-static, in anticipation of users outside of enlighten.c
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
We now support the use of memory hotplug, so the physical to machine
page mapping structure must be dynamic. This is implemented as a
two-level radix tree structure, which allows us to efficiently
incrementally allocate memory for the p2m table as new pages are
added.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
move arch/x86/xen/events.c undedr drivers/xen to share codes
with x86 and ia64. And minor adjustment to compile.
ia64/xen also uses events.c
Signed-off-by: Yaozu (Eddie) Dong <eddie.dong@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Isaku Yamahata <yamahata@valinux.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Xen supports the notion of a debug interrupt which can be triggered
from the console. For now this is implemented to show pending events,
masks and each CPU's pending event set.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
64-bit Xen supports sysenter for 32-bit guests, so support its
use. (sysenter is faster than int $0x80 in 32-on-64.)
sysexit is still not supported, so we fake it up using iret.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Change iret implementation to not be dependent on direct-access vcpu
structure.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
When a pagetable is no longer in use, it must be unpinned so that its
pages can be freed. However, this is only possible if there are no
stray uses of the pagetable. The code currently deals with all the
usual cases, but there's a rare case where a vcpu is changing cr3, but
is doing so lazily, and the change hasn't actually happened by the time
the pagetable is unpinned, even though it appears to have been completed.
This change adds a second per-cpu cr3 variable - xen_current_cr3 -
which tracks the actual state of the vcpu cr3. It is only updated once
the actual hypercall to set cr3 has been completed. Other processors
wishing to unpin a pagetable can check other vcpu's xen_current_cr3
values to see if any cross-cpu IPIs are needed to clean things up.
[ Stable folks: 2.6.23 bugfix ]
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Stable Kernel <stable@kernel.org>
Currently, the set_lazy_mode pv_op is overloaded with 5 functions:
1. enter lazy cpu mode
2. leave lazy cpu mode
3. enter lazy mmu mode
4. leave lazy mmu mode
5. flush pending batched operations
This complicates each paravirt backend, since it needs to deal with
all the possible state transitions, handling flushing, etc. In
particular, flushing is quite distinct from the other 4 functions, and
seems to just cause complication.
This patch removes the set_lazy_mode operation, and adds "enter" and
"leave" lazy mode operations on mmu_ops and cpu_ops. All the logic
associated with enter and leaving lazy states is now in common code
(basically BUG_ONs to make sure that no mode is current when entering
a lazy mode, and make sure that the mode is current when leaving).
Also, flush is handled in a common way, by simply leaving and
re-entering the lazy mode.
The result is that the Xen, lguest and VMI lazy mode implementations
are much simpler.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Zach Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
Cc: Anthony Liguory <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
Cc: "Glauber de Oliveira Costa" <glommer@gmail.com>
Cc: Jun Nakajima <jun.nakajima@intel.com>
Most of the time we can simply use the iret instruction to exit the
kernel, rather than having to use the iret hypercall - the only
exception is if we're returning into vm86 mode, or from delivering an
NMI (which we don't support yet).
When running native, iret has the behaviour of testing for a pending
interrupt atomically with re-enabling interrupts. Unfortunately
there's no way to do this with Xen, so there's a window in which we
could get a recursive exception after enabling events but before
actually returning to userspace.
This causes a problem: if the nested interrupt causes one of the
task's TIF_WORK_MASK flags to be set, they will not be checked again
before returning to userspace. This means that pending work may be
left pending indefinitely, until the process enters and leaves the
kernel again. The net effect is that a pending signal or reschedule
event could be delayed for an unbounded amount of time.
To deal with this, the xen event upcall handler checks to see if the
EIP is within the critical section of the iret code, after events
are (potentially) enabled up to the iret itself. If its within this
range, it calls the iret critical section fixup, which adjusts the
stack to deal with any unrestored registers, and then shifts the
stack frame up to replace the previous invocation.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
This patchs adds the mechanism to allow us to patch inline versions of
common operations.
The implementations of the direct-access versions save_fl, restore_fl,
irq_enable and irq_disable are now in assembler, and the same code is
used for both out of line and inline uses.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com>
An experimental patch for Xen allows guests to place their vcpu_info
structs anywhere. We try to use this to place the vcpu_info into the
PDA, which allows direct access.
If this works, then switch to using direct access operations for
irq_enable, disable, save_fl and restore_fl.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com>
This is a fairly straightforward Xen implementation of smp_ops.
Xen has its own IPI mechanisms, and has no dependency on any
APIC-based IPI. The smp_ops hooks and the flush_tlb_others pv_op
allow a Xen guest to avoid all APIC code in arch/i386 (the only apic
operation is a single apic_read for the apic version number).
One subtle point which needs to be addressed is unpinning pagetables
when another cpu may have a lazy tlb reference to the pagetable. Xen
will not allow an in-use pagetable to be unpinned, so we must find any
other cpus with a reference to the pagetable and get them to shoot
down their references.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Implement xen_sched_clock, which returns the number of ns the current
vcpu has been actually in an unstolen state (ie, running or blocked,
vs runnable-but-not-running, or offline) since boot.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
Xen requires all active pagetables to be marked read-only. When the
base of the pagetable is loaded into %cr3, the hypervisor validates
the entire pagetable and only allows the load to proceed if it all
checks out.
This is pretty slow, so to mitigate this cost Xen has a notion of
pinned pagetables. Pinned pagetables are pagetables which are
considered to be active even if no processor's cr3 is pointing to is.
This means that it must remain read-only and all updates are validated
by the hypervisor. This makes context switches much cheaper, because
the hypervisor doesn't need to revalidate the pagetable each time.
This also adds a new paravirt hook which is called during setup once
the zones and memory allocator have been initialized. When the
init_mm pagetable is first built, the struct page array does not yet
exist, and so there's nowhere to put he init_mm pagetable's PG_pinned
flags. Once the zones are initialized and the struct page array
exists, we can set the PG_pinned flags for those pages.
This patch also adds the Xen support for pte pages allocated out of
highmem (highpte) by implementing xen_kmap_atomic_pte.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Zach Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
This patch is a rollup of all the core pieces of the Xen
implementation, including:
- booting and setup
- pagetable setup
- privileged instructions
- segmentation
- interrupt flags
- upcalls
- multicall batching
BOOTING AND SETUP
The vmlinux image is decorated with ELF notes which tell the Xen
domain builder what the kernel's requirements are; the domain builder
then constructs the address space accordingly and starts the kernel.
Xen has its own entrypoint for the kernel (contained in an ELF note).
The ELF notes are set up by xen-head.S, which is included into head.S.
In principle it could be linked separately, but it seems to provoke
lots of binutils bugs.
Because the domain builder starts the kernel in a fairly sane state
(32-bit protected mode, paging enabled, flat segments set up), there's
not a lot of setup needed before starting the kernel proper. The main
steps are:
1. Install the Xen paravirt_ops, which is simply a matter of a
structure assignment.
2. Set init_mm to use the Xen-supplied pagetables (analogous to the
head.S generated pagetables in a native boot).
3. Reserve address space for Xen, since it takes a chunk at the top
of the address space for its own use.
4. Call start_kernel()
PAGETABLE SETUP
Once we hit the main kernel boot sequence, it will end up calling back
via paravirt_ops to set up various pieces of Xen specific state. One
of the critical things which requires a bit of extra care is the
construction of the initial init_mm pagetable. Because Xen places
tight constraints on pagetables (an active pagetable must always be
valid, and must always be mapped read-only to the guest domain), we
need to be careful when constructing the new pagetable to keep these
constraints in mind. It turns out that the easiest way to do this is
use the initial Xen-provided pagetable as a template, and then just
insert new mappings for memory where a mapping doesn't already exist.
This means that during pagetable setup, it uses a special version of
xen_set_pte which ignores any attempt to remap a read-only page as
read-write (since Xen will map its own initial pagetable as RO), but
lets other changes to the ptes happen, so that things like NX are set
properly.
PRIVILEGED INSTRUCTIONS AND SEGMENTATION
When the kernel runs under Xen, it runs in ring 1 rather than ring 0.
This means that it is more privileged than user-mode in ring 3, but it
still can't run privileged instructions directly. Non-performance
critical instructions are dealt with by taking a privilege exception
and trapping into the hypervisor and emulating the instruction, but
more performance-critical instructions have their own specific
paravirt_ops. In many cases we can avoid having to do any hypercalls
for these instructions, or the Xen implementation is quite different
from the normal native version.
The privileged instructions fall into the broad classes of:
Segmentation: setting up the GDT and the GDT entries, LDT,
TLS and so on. Xen doesn't allow the GDT to be directly
modified; all GDT updates are done via hypercalls where the new
entries can be validated. This is important because Xen uses
segment limits to prevent the guest kernel from damaging the
hypervisor itself.
Traps and exceptions: Xen uses a special format for trap entrypoints,
so when the kernel wants to set an IDT entry, it needs to be
converted to the form Xen expects. Xen sets int 0x80 up specially
so that the trap goes straight from userspace into the guest kernel
without going via the hypervisor. sysenter isn't supported.
Kernel stack: The esp0 entry is extracted from the tss and provided to
Xen.
TLB operations: the various TLB calls are mapped into corresponding
Xen hypercalls.
Control registers: all the control registers are privileged. The most
important is cr3, which points to the base of the current pagetable,
and we handle it specially.
Another instruction we treat specially is CPUID, even though its not
privileged. We want to control what CPU features are visible to the
rest of the kernel, and so CPUID ends up going into a paravirt_op.
Xen implements this mainly to disable the ACPI and APIC subsystems.
INTERRUPT FLAGS
Xen maintains its own separate flag for masking events, which is
contained within the per-cpu vcpu_info structure. Because the guest
kernel runs in ring 1 and not 0, the IF flag in EFLAGS is completely
ignored (and must be, because even if a guest domain disables
interrupts for itself, it can't disable them overall).
(A note on terminology: "events" and interrupts are effectively
synonymous. However, rather than using an "enable flag", Xen uses a
"mask flag", which blocks event delivery when it is non-zero.)
There are paravirt_ops for each of cli/sti/save_fl/restore_fl, which
are implemented to manage the Xen event mask state. The only thing
worth noting is that when events are unmasked, we need to explicitly
see if there's a pending event and call into the hypervisor to make
sure it gets delivered.
UPCALLS
Xen needs a couple of upcall (or callback) functions to be implemented
by each guest. One is the event upcalls, which is how events
(interrupts, effectively) are delivered to the guests. The other is
the failsafe callback, which is used to report errors in either
reloading a segment register, or caused by iret. These are
implemented in i386/kernel/entry.S so they can jump into the normal
iret_exc path when necessary.
MULTICALL BATCHING
Xen provides a multicall mechanism, which allows multiple hypercalls
to be issued at once in order to mitigate the cost of trapping into
the hypervisor. This is particularly useful for context switches,
since the 4-5 hypercalls they would normally need (reload cr3, update
TLS, maybe update LDT) can be reduced to one. This patch implements a
generic batching mechanism for hypercalls, which gets used in many
places in the Xen code.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Ian Pratt <ian.pratt@xensource.com>
Cc: Christian Limpach <Christian.Limpach@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Thomas Gleixner