Re: [PATCH 2/2] perf/x86/intel/pt: Fail event creation if VMX operation is on

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Wed Feb 15 2017 - 08:37:39 EST


On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 03:05:10PM +0200, Alexander Shishkin wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 10:34:58AM +0200, Alexander Shishkin wrote:
> >
> >> Well, we can't make the limitation go away. You'll still have to stop
> >> kvms to get any 'meaningful' PT data.
> >
> > Why would you need to stop all VMs in order to get your !VM data? Sure,
> > you get black holes where the VM runs, but we should be able to see
> > everything else.
>
> No, what I mean is that if you run kvm prior to starting perf record,
> which I assume is the case for acme, your entire session is a black
> hole. The VMXON happens pretty early on, you can open /dev/kvm,
> ioctl(KVM_CREATE_VM) on it and that will do a VMXON already.

kvm_intel has a vmm_exclusive parameter, if you set that to 0 is
_should_ behave much better.