Re: OVMF very slow on AMD

[Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>]

On 07/28/2016 11:51 AM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 28/07/16 16:17, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
>> On 07/28/2016 06:54 AM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>> On 28/07/16 11:43, George Dunlap wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Anthony PERARD
>>>> <anthony.perard@citrix.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 03:45:23PM -0400, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
>>>>>> On 07/27/2016 07:35 AM, Anthony PERARD wrote:
>>>>>>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 12:08:04PM +0100, Anthony PERARD wrote:
>>>>>>>> I can try to describe how OVMF is setting up the memory.
>>>>>>> From the start of the day:
>>>>>>> setup gdt
>>>>>>> cr0 = 0x40000023
>>>>>> I think this is slightly odd, with bit 30 (cache disable) set. I'd
>>>>>> suspect that this would affect both Intel and AMD though.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Can you try clearing this bit?
>>>>> That works...
>>>>>
>>>>> I wonder why it does not appear to affect Intel or KVM.
>>>> Are those bits hard-coded, or are they set based on the hardware
>>>> that's available?
>>>>
>>>> Is it possible that the particular combination of CPUID bits presented
>>>> by Xen on AMD are causing a different value to be written?
>>>>
>>>> Or is it possible that the cache disable bit is being ignored (by Xen)
>>>> on Intel and KVM?
>>> If a guest has no hardware, then it has no reason to actually disable
>>> caches.  We should have logic to catch this an avoid actually disabling
>>> caches when the guest asks for it.
>> Is this really safe to do? Can't a guest decide to disable cache to
>> avoid having to deal with coherency in SW?
> What SW coherency issue do you think can be solved with disabling the cache?
>
> x86 has strict ordering of writes and reads with respect to each other. 
> The only case which can be out of order is reads promoted ahead of
> unaliasing writes.

Right, that was not a good example.

>
>> As far as Intel vs AMD implementation in Xen, we have vmx_handle_cd()
>> but no corresponding SVM code. Could it be that we need to set gPAT, for
>> example?
> A better approach would be to find out why ovmf insists on disabling
> caches at all.  Even if we optimise the non-PCI-device case in the
> hypervisor, a passthrough case will still run like treacle if caches are
> disabled.

True, we should understand why OVMF does this. But I think we also need
to understand what makes Intel run faster. Or is it already clear from
vmx_handle_cd()?

-boris



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