Re: [PATCH] x86/perf: Default freeze_on_smi on for Comet Lake and later.

[Liang, Kan]

On 1/24/2022 11:30 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2022 at 11:00:56AM -0500, Liang, Kan wrote:
> > On 1/24/2022 7:21 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:26:44PM -0800, Kyle Huey wrote:
> > > > Beginning in Comet Lake, Intel extended the concept of privilege rings to
> > > > SMM.[0] A side effect of this is that events caused by execution of code
> > > > in SMM are now visible to performance counters with IA32_PERFEVTSELx.USR
> > > > set.
> > > >
> > > > rr[1] depends on exact counts of performance events for the user space
> > > > tracee, so this change in behavior is fatal for us. It is, however, easily
> > > > corrected by setting IA32_DEBUGCTL.FREEZE_WHILE_SMM to 1 (visible in sysfs
> > > > as /sys/devices/cpu/freeze_on_smi). While we can and will tell our users to
> > > > set freeze_on_smi manually when appropriate, because observing events in
> > > > SMM is rarely useful to anyone, we propose to change the default value of
> > > > this switch.
> >
> > + Andi
> >
> >  From we heard many times from sophisticated customers, they really hate
> > blind spots. They want to see everything. That's why we set freeze_on_smi to
> > 0 as default. I think the patch breaks the principle.
>
> Well, USR really, as in *REALLY* should not be counting SMM. That's just
> plain broken.

For the USR only case, the bit could be set.

> There's maybe an argument to include it in OS, but USR is ring-3.

But we don't have an option for the USR only case. The changing will 
impact the SYS case as well. Personally, maybe it's better to let the 
user apace app control the bit as needed rather than changing the 
default kernel value for all cases.

Thanks,
Kan