Re: [PATCH v4 2/5] KVM: X86: Bail out of direct yield in case of under-committed scenarios

From: Sean Christopherson
Date: Tue May 18 2021 - 15:21:53 EST


On Tue, May 18, 2021, Wanpeng Li wrote:
> From: Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> In case of under-committed scenarios, vCPU can get scheduling easily,
> kvm_vcpu_yield_to add extra overhead, we can observe a lot of race
> between vcpu->ready is true and yield fails due to p->state is
> TASK_RUNNING. Let's bail out in such scenarios by checking the length
> of current cpu runqueue, it can be treated as a hint of under-committed
> instead of guarantee of accuracy. The directed_yield_successful/attempted
> ratio can be improved from 50+% to 80+% in the under-committed scenario.

The "50+% to 80+%" comment will be a bit confusing for future readers now that
the single_task_running() case counts as an attempt. I think the new comment
would be something like "30%+ of directed-yield attempts can avoid the expensive
lookups in kvm_sched_yield() in an under-committed scenario." That would also
provide the real justification, as bumping the success ratio isn't the true goal
of this path.

> Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> v2 -> v3:
> * update patch description
> v1 -> v2:
> * move the check after attempted counting
> * update patch description
>
> arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 3 +++
> 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c b/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
> index 9b6bca616929..dfb7c320581f 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
> @@ -8360,6 +8360,9 @@ static void kvm_sched_yield(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, unsigned long dest_id)
>
> vcpu->stat.directed_yield_attempted++;
>
> + if (single_task_running())
> + goto no_yield;
> +
> rcu_read_lock();
> map = rcu_dereference(vcpu->kvm->arch.apic_map);
>
> --
> 2.25.1
>