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Re: [Xen-devel] [for-4.7] xen/arm: Force broadcast of TLB and instruction cache maintenance instructions



Hi Stefano,

On 26/04/2016 10:45, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
On Mon, 25 Apr 2016, Julien Grall wrote:
On 25/04/16 11:45, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
On Mon, 18 Apr 2016, Julien Grall wrote:
UP guest usually uses TLB instruction to flush only on the local CPU. The
TLB flush won't be broadcasted across all the CPUs within the same
innershareable domain.

When the vCPU is migrated between different CPUs, it may be rescheduled
to a previous CPU where the TLB has not been flushed. The TLB may
contain stale entries which will result to translate incorrectly a VA to
IPA or even cause TLB conflicts.

To avoid a such situation, always set HCR_EL2.FB which will force the
broadcast of TLB and instruction cache maintenance instructions.
Cheers,

Signed-off-by: Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxx>

Well spotted!

Julien, I was wondering whether we could avoid the HCR_FB by manually
doing a flush in ctxt_switch_from or context_switch. I am suggesting
this because I have the feeling that enabling HCR_FB would have a
negative performance impact.

The performance impact will depend on how much the guest makes use of local
flush instructions.

When HCR.FB is set, the hardware will broadcast the flush (TLBs, instruction
cache or branch predictor) to all the CPUs in the same innershareable domain.
I.e any local flush instructions will be upgraded to innershareable.

ARM64 Linux kernel is SMP-aware (no possibility to build only for UP), most of
the flush instructions are innershareable. The local flushes are limited to
boot (1 flush per CPU) and when the ASID of a task is changing. Therefore the
impact of setting HCR.FB for ARM64 Linux guest would be very limited.

ARM32 Linux kernel can be built SMP-aware or only UP-aware. The former, will
make a very limited use of those instructions. The latter will obviously use
only local flush instructions. Therefore, there will be an impact to set
HCR.FB for UP-aware kernel guest.

I have looked quickly at FreeBSD (both ARM64 and ARM32). SMP-aware kernel will
mostly make use of innershareable flush instructions. UP-aware kernel will
only make use of local flush instructions.

However, nothing prevent an SMP-aware kernel to make more often use of local
flush instructions.

In the case that HCR.FB is not set, Xen would need to:
* Flush all the TLBs for the VMID associated to this domain
* Invalidate all the entries from branch predictors (on for AArch32)
* Invalidate all the entries from the instruction cache
Whilst you suggested to do it at every domain context switch, this is only
necessary when the vCPU migrates between 2 physical CPUs.

In any case, not setting HCR.FB will have a big impact on any SMP-aware
Linux/Freebsd kernel as any context switch (or migration) will nuke the TLBs,
the instruction cache and the branch predictor.

That would be extremely bad. I think we should be able to perform the
tlb flushing only for domains that have only 1 vcpus, which should limit
the negative effects of the change.

Well, even if the domain has only 1 vCPU, the kernel could be SMP-aware. For instance Linux ARM64 will always use innershareable flush no matter how many vCPUs is given to the domain.

So this would have a negative performance impact on those domains.


The impact of HCR.FB on UP-aware kernel would need to be benchmarked.
But to be honest, I expect most of the kernels, which run in a guest, to be
SMP-aware.

So setting HCR.FB seems to be the best solution. We can revisit it later, if
we notice negative performance impact.

I agree that setting HCR.FB is an very simple solution to the problem.
It has hard to argue against that :-)  It would be nice at some point to
write a prototype of the tlb flushing at vcpu migration and give it a try.

We would need a big system, such as Thunder-x with 96 cores, to be able to see a difference.

I have added the item in the todo list:
http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_TODO#Investigation_on_HCR.FB


For now could you please summarize your thoughts on this in the commit
message so that a couple of years down the line we can still find them?

Sure, I will resend the patch with the commit message updated.

Regards,

--
Julien Grall

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