New AMD processors (Family 0x10 models 8+) support the Pause
Filter Feature. This feature creates a new field in the VMCB
called Pause Filter Count. If Pause Filter Count is greater
than 0 and intercepting PAUSEs is enabled, the processor will
increment an internal counter when a PAUSE instruction occurs
instead of intercepting. When the internal counter reaches the
Pause Filter Count value, a PAUSE intercept will occur.
This feature can be used to detect contended spinlocks,
especially when the lock holding VCPU is not scheduled.
Rescheduling another VCPU prevents the VCPU seeking the
lock from wasting its quantum by spinning idly.
Experimental results show that most spinlocks are held
for less than 1000 PAUSE cycles or more than a few
thousand. Default the Pause Filter Counter to 3000 to
detect the contended spinlocks.
Processor support for this feature is indicated by a CPUID
bit.
On a 24 core system running 4 guests each with 16 VCPUs,
this patch improved overall performance of each guest's
32 job kernbench by approximately 3-5% when combined
with a scheduler algorithm thati caused the VCPU to
sleep for a brief period. Further performance improvement
may be possible with a more sophisticated yield algorithm.
Signed-off-by: Mark Langsdorf <mark.langsdorf@amd.com>
Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
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