Commit 15038e14 authored Oct 26, 2017 by Paolo Bonzini

KVM: SVM: obey guest PAT

For many years some users of assigned devices have reported worse
performance on AMD processors with NPT than on AMD without NPT,
Intel or bare metal.

The reason turned out to be that SVM is discarding the guest PAT
setting and uses the default (PA0=PA4=WB, PA1=PA5=WT, PA2=PA6=UC-,
PA3=UC).  The guest might be using a different setting, and
especially might want write combining but isn't getting it
(instead getting slow UC or UC- accesses).

Thanks a lot to geoff@hostfission.com for noticing the relation
to the g_pat setting.  The patch has been tested also by a bunch
of people on VFIO users forums.

Fixes: 709ddebf
Fixes: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196409


Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Nick Sarnie <commendsarnex@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@redhat.com>

parent fc3790fa

arch/x86/kvm/svm.c

+7 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -3671,6 +3671,13 @@ static int svm_set_msr(struct kvm_vcpu vcpu, struct msr_data msr)
		u32 ecx = msr->index;
		u64 data = msr->data;
		switch (ecx) {
		case MSR_IA32_CR_PAT:
		if (!kvm_mtrr_valid(vcpu, MSR_IA32_CR_PAT, data))
		return 1;
		vcpu->arch.pat = data;
		svm->vmcb->save.g_pat = data;
		mark_dirty(svm->vmcb, VMCB_NPT);
		break;
		case MSR_IA32_TSC:
		kvm_write_tsc(vcpu, msr);
		break;

Admin message