Re: [PATCH v5] enable x2APIC without interrupt remapping under KVM

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Fri Jul 03 2009 - 04:29:33 EST



* Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 06:30 -0700, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> > KVM would like to provide x2APIC interface to a guest without emulating
> > interrupt remapping device. The reason KVM prefers guest to use x2APIC
> > is that x2APIC interface is better virtualizable and provides better
> > performance than mmio xAPIC interface:
> >
> > - msr exits are faster than mmio (no page table walk, emulation)
> > - no need to read back ICR to look at the busy bit
> > - one 64 bit ICR write instead of two 32 bit writes
> > - shared code with the Hyper-V paravirt interface
> >
> > Included patch changes x2APIC enabling logic to enable it even if IR
> > initialization failed, but kernel runs under KVM and no apic id is
> > greater than 255 (if there is one spec requires BIOS to move to x2apic
> > mode before starting an OS).
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Gleb Natapov <gleb@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Acked-by: Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@xxxxxxxxx>

Now, since this affects core x86 APIC code non-trivially so should
submitted to and go via the x86 tree. (Can prepare a special branch
with just this change if KVM tree wants/needs to pull it before
v2.6.32.)

Ingo
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