On 2021/4/9 16:46, Like Xu wrote:
Hi Liuxiangdong,

On 2021/4/9 16:33, Liuxiangdong (Aven, Cloud Infrastructure Service Product Dept.) wrote:
Do you have any comments or ideas about it ?

https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/606e5ef6.2060...@huawei.com/

My expectation is that there may be many fewer PEBS samples
on Skylake without any soft lockup.

You may need to confirm the statement

"All that matters is that the EPT pages don't get
unmapped ever while PEBS is active"

is true in the kernel level.

Try "-overcommit mem-lock=on" for your qemu.


We have used "-overcommit mem-lock=on" for qemu when soft lockup.

It seems that ept violation happens when we use pebs.

[ 5199.056246] Call Trace:
[ 5199.056248] _raw_spin_lock+0x1b/0x20[ 5199.056251] follow_page_pte+0xf5/0x580 [ 5199.056258] __get_user_pages+0x1d6/0x750[ 5199.056262] get_user_pages_unlocked+0xdc/0x310
[ 5199.056265]  __gfn_to_pfn_memslot+0x12d/0x4d0 [kvm]
[ 5199.056304]  try_async_pf+0xcc/0x250 [kvm]
[ 5199.056337]  direct_page_fault+0x413/0xa90 [kvm]
[ 5199.056367]  kvm_mmu_page_fault+0x77/0x5e0 [kvm]
[ 5199.056395]  ? vprintk_emit+0xa2/0x240
[ 5199.056399]  ? vmx_vmexit+0x1d/0x40 [kvm_intel]
[ 5199.056407]  ? vmx_vmexit+0x11/0x40 [kvm_intel]
[ 5199.056412]  vmx_handle_exit+0xfe/0x640 [kvm_intel]
[ 5199.056418]  vcpu_enter_guest+0x904/0x1450 [kvm]
[ 5199.056445]  ? kvm_apic_has_interrupt+0x44/0x80 [kvm]
[ 5199.056472]  ? apic_has_interrupt_for_ppr+0x62/0x90 [kvm]
[ 5199.056498]  ? kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl_run+0xeb/0x550 [kvm]
[ 5199.056523]  kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl_run+0xeb/0x550 [kvm]
[ 5199.056547]  kvm_vcpu_ioctl+0x23e/0x5b0 [kvm]
[ 5199.056568]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x8e/0xd0
[ 5199.056571]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x40
[ 5199.056574]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae


SDM 17.4.9.2 "Setting Up the DS Save Area" says:

The recording of branch records in the BTS buffer (or PEBS records in the PEBS buffer) may not operate properly if accesses to the linear addresses in any of the three DS save area sections cause page faults, VM exits, or the setting of accessed or dirty flags in the paging structures (ordinary or EPT). For that reason, system software should establish paging structures (both ordinary and EPT) to prevent such occurrences. Implications of this may be that an operating system should allocate this memory from a non-paged pool and that system software cannot do “lazy” page-table entry propagation for these pages. Some newer processor generations support “lazy” EPT page-table entry propagation for PEBS; see Section 18.3.10.1 and Section 18.9.5 for more information. A virtual-machine monitor may choose to allow use of PEBS by guest software
only if EPT maps all guest-physical memory as present and read/write.


The reason why soft lockup happens may be the unmapped EPT pages. So, do we have a way to map all gpa
before we use pebs on Skylake?




On 2021/4/6 13:14, Xu, Like wrote:
Hi Xiangdong,

On 2021/4/6 11:24, Liuxiangdong (Aven, Cloud Infrastructure Service Product Dept.) wrote:
Hi,like.
Some questions about this new pebs patches set:
https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20210329054137.120994-2-like...@linux.intel.com/

The new hardware facility supporting guest PEBS is only available
on Intel Ice Lake Server platforms for now.

Yes, we have documented this "EPT-friendly PEBS" capability in the SDM
18.3.10.1 Processor Event Based Sampling (PEBS) Facility

And again, this patch set doesn't officially support guest PEBS on the Skylake.



AFAIK, Icelake supports adaptive PEBS and extended PEBS which Skylake doesn't. But we can still use IA32_PEBS_ENABLE MSR to indicate general-purpose counter in Skylake.

For Skylake, only the PMC0-PMC3 are valid for PEBS and you may
mask the other unsupported bits in the pmu->pebs_enable_mask.

Is there anything else that only Icelake supports in this patches set?

The PDIR counter on the Ice Lake is the fixed counter 0
while the PDIR counter on the Sky Lake is the gp counter 1.

You may also expose x86_pmu.pebs_vmx for Skylake in the 1st patch.



Besides, we have tried this patches set in Icelake. We can use pebs(eg: "perf record -e cycles:pp") when guest is kernel-5.11, but can't when kernel-4.18. Is there a minimum guest kernel version requirement?

The Ice Lake CPU model has been added since v5.4.

You may double check whether the stable tree(s) code has
INTEL_FAM6_ICELAKE in the arch/x86/include/asm/intel-family.h.



Thanks,
Xiangdong Liu




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