On an (even slightly) oversubscribed system, spinlocks are quickly
becoming a bottleneck, as some vcpus are spinning, waiting for a
lock to be released, while the vcpu holding the lock may not be
running at all.

This creates contention, and the observed slowdown is 40x for
hackbench. No, this isn't a typo.

The solution is to trap blocking WFEs and tell KVM that we're
now spinning. This ensures that other vpus will get a scheduling
boost, allowing the lock to be released more quickly.

>From a performance point of view: hackbench 1 process 1000

2xA15 host (baseline):  1.843s

2xA15 guest w/o patch:  2.083s
4xA15 guest w/o patch:  80.212s

2xA15 guest w/ patch:   2.072s
4xA15 guest w/ patch:   3.202s

So we go from a 40x degradation to 1.5x, which is vaguely more
acceptable.

Signed-off-by: Marc Zyngier <marc.zyng...@arm.com>
---
 arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_arm.h | 4 +++-
 arch/arm/kvm/handle_exit.c     | 6 +++++-
 2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_arm.h b/arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_arm.h
index 64e9696..693d5b2 100644
--- a/arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_arm.h
+++ b/arch/arm/include/asm/kvm_arm.h
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@
  */
 #define HCR_GUEST_MASK (HCR_TSC | HCR_TSW | HCR_TWI | HCR_VM | HCR_BSU_IS | \
                        HCR_FB | HCR_TAC | HCR_AMO | HCR_IMO | HCR_FMO | \
-                       HCR_SWIO | HCR_TIDCP)
+                       HCR_TWE | HCR_SWIO | HCR_TIDCP)
 #define HCR_VIRT_EXCP_MASK (HCR_VA | HCR_VI | HCR_VF)
 
 /* System Control Register (SCTLR) bits */
@@ -208,6 +208,8 @@
 #define HSR_EC_DABT    (0x24)
 #define HSR_EC_DABT_HYP        (0x25)
 
+#define HSR_WFI_IS_WFE         (1U << 0)
+
 #define HSR_HVC_IMM_MASK       ((1UL << 16) - 1)
 
 #define HSR_DABT_S1PTW         (1U << 7)
diff --git a/arch/arm/kvm/handle_exit.c b/arch/arm/kvm/handle_exit.c
index df4c82d..c4c496f 100644
--- a/arch/arm/kvm/handle_exit.c
+++ b/arch/arm/kvm/handle_exit.c
@@ -84,7 +84,11 @@ static int handle_dabt_hyp(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, struct 
kvm_run *run)
 static int kvm_handle_wfi(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, struct kvm_run *run)
 {
        trace_kvm_wfi(*vcpu_pc(vcpu));
-       kvm_vcpu_block(vcpu);
+       if (kvm_vcpu_get_hsr(vcpu) & HSR_WFI_IS_WFE)
+               kvm_vcpu_on_spin(vcpu);
+       else
+               kvm_vcpu_block(vcpu);
+
        return 1;
 }
 
-- 
1.8.2.3


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