arm64: Avoid repeated AA64MMFR1_EL1 register read on pagefault path
authorGabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@suse.de>
Mon, 9 Jan 2023 15:19:55 +0000 (12:19 -0300)
committerCatalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Fri, 20 Jan 2023 13:22:28 +0000 (13:22 +0000)
commita89c6bcdac22bec1bfbe6e64060b4cf5838d4f47
tree66d727b7615090a603cab5b058dc4732e3ce73b8
parent5a4c2a314083b07751c3151baf5e6ed7cc3aba36
arm64: Avoid repeated AA64MMFR1_EL1 register read on pagefault path

Accessing AA64MMFR1_EL1 is expensive in KVM guests, since it is emulated
in the hypervisor.  In fact, ARM documentation mentions some feature
registers are not supposed to be accessed frequently by the OS, and
therefore should be emulated for guests [1].

Commit 0388f9c74330 ("arm64: mm: Implement
arch_wants_old_prefaulted_pte()") introduced a read of this register in
the page fault path.  But, even when the feature of setting faultaround
pages with the old flag is disabled for a given cpu, we are still paying
the cost of checking the register on every pagefault. This results in an
explosion of vmexit events in KVM guests, which directly impacts the
performance of virtualized workloads.  For instance, running kernbench
yields a 15% increase in system time solely due to the increased vmexit
cycles.

This patch avoids the extra cost by using the sanitized cached value.
It should be safe to do so, since this register mustn't change for a
given cpu.

[1] https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Community/PDF/Learn%20the%20Architecture/Armv8-A%20virtualization.pdf?revision=a765a7df-1a00-434d-b241-357bfda2dd31

Signed-off-by: Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@arm.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230109151955.8292-1-krisman@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
arch/arm64/include/asm/cpufeature.h