The introduction of parallel event queues added most of the support
needed to run multiple VMs (systems) within the same gem5
instance. This changeset fixes up signal delivery so that KVM's
control signals are delivered to the thread that executes the CPU's
event queue. Specifically:
* Timers and counters are now initialized from a separate method
(startupThread) that is scheduled as the first event in the
thread-specific event queue. This ensures that they are
initialized from the thread that is going to execute the CPUs
event queue and enables signal delivery to the right thread when
exiting from KVM.
* The POSIX-timer-based KVM timer (used to force exits from KVM) has
been updated to deliver signals to the thread that's executing KVM
instead of the process (thread is undefined in that case). This
assumes that the timer is instantiated from the thread that is
going to execute the KVM vCPU.
* Signal masking is now done using pthread_sigmask instead of
sigprocmask. The behavior of the latter is undefined in threaded
applications.
* Since signal masks can be inherited, make sure to actively unmask
the control signals when setting up the KVM signal mask.
There are currently no facilities to multiplex between multiple KVM
CPUs in the same event queue, we are therefore limited to
configurations where there is only one KVM CPU per event queue. In
practice, this means that multi-system configurations can be
simulated, but not multiple CPUs in a shared-memory configuration.
Instruction events are currently ignored when executing in KVM. This
changeset adds support for triggering KVM exits based on instruction
counts using hardware performance counters. Depending on the
underlying performance counter implementation, there might be some
inaccuracies due to instructions being counted in the host kernel when
entering/exiting KVM.
Due to limitations/bugs in Linux's performance counter interface, we
can't reliably change the period of an overflow counter. We work
around this issue by detaching and reattaching the counter if we need
to reconfigure it.
This changeset adds the following stats to KVM:
* numVMHalfEntries: Number of entries into KVM to finalize pending
IO operations without executing guest instructions. These typically
happen as a result of a drain where the guest must finalize some
operations before the guest state is consistent.
* numExitSignal: Number of VM exits that have been triggered by a
signal. These usually happen as a result of the timer that limits
the time spent in KVM.
We used to use the KVM CPU's clock to specify the host frequency. This
was not ideal for several reasons. One of them being that the clock
parameter of a CPU determines the frequency of some of the components
connected to the CPU. This changeset adds a separate hostFreq
parameter that should be used to specify the host frequency until we
add code to autodetect it. The hostFactor should still be used to
specify the conversion factor between the host performance and that of
the simulated system.
We currently execute instructions in the guest and then handle any IO
request right after we break out of the virtualized environment. This
has the effect of executing IO requests in the exact same tick as the
first instruction in the sequence that was just run. There seem to be
cases where this simplification upsets some timing-sensitive devices.
This changeset splits execute and IO (and other services) across
multiple ticks. This is implemented by adding a separate
RunningService state to the CPU state machine. When a VM requires
service, it enters into this state and pending IO is then serviced in
the future instead of immediately. The delay between getting the
request and servicing it depends on the number of cycles executed in
the guest, which allows other components to catch up with the CPU.
Update the system's totalNumInst counter when exiting from KVM and
maintain an internal absolute instruction count instead of relying on
the one from perf.
Some architectures have special registers in the guest that can be
used to do cycle accounting. This is generally preferrable since the
prevents the guest from seeing a non-monotonic clock. This changeset
adds a virtual method, getHostCycles(), that the architecture-specific
code can override to implement this functionallity. The default
implementation uses the hwCycles counter.
The CpuPort class was removed before the KVM patches were committed,
which means that the KVM interface currently doesn't compile. This
changeset adds the BaseKvmCPU::KVMCpuPort class which derives from
MasterPort. This class is used on the data and instruction ports
instead of the old CpuPort.
This changeset adds a 'numInsts' stat to the KVM-based CPU. It also
cleans up the variable names in kvmRun to make the distinction between
host cycles and estimated simulated cycles clearer. As a bonus
feature, it also fixes a warning (unreferenced variable) when
compiling in fast mode.
Add support for using the CPU cycle counter instead of a normal POSIX
timer to generate timed exits to gem5. This should, in theory, provide
better resolution when requesting timer signals.
The perf-based timer requires a fairly recent kernel since it requires
a working PERF_EVENT_IOC_PERIOD ioctl. This ioctl has existed in the
kernel for a long time, but it used to be completely broken due to an
inverted match when the kernel copied things from user
space. Additionally, the ioctl does not change the sample period
correctly on all kernel versions which implement it. It is currently
only known to work reliably on kernel version 3.7 and above on ARM.
Reduce the number of KVM->TC synchronizations by overloading the
getContext() method and only request an update when the TC is
requested as opposed to every time KVM returns to gem5.
This changeset introduces the architecture independent parts required
to support KVM-accelerated CPUs. It introduces two new simulation
objects:
KvmVM -- The KVM VM is a component shared between all CPUs in a shared
memory domain. It is typically instantiated as a child of the
system object in the simulation hierarchy. It provides access
to KVM VM specific interfaces.
BaseKvmCPU -- Abstract base class for all KVM-based CPUs. Architecture
dependent CPU implementations inherit from this class
and implement the following methods:
* updateKvmState() -- Update the
architecture-dependent KVM state from the gem5
thread context associated with the CPU.
* updateThreadContext() -- Update the thread context
from the architecture-dependent KVM state.
* dump() -- Dump the KVM state using (optional).
In order to deliver interrupts to the guest, CPU
implementations typically override the tick() method and
check for, and deliver, interrupts prior to entering
KVM.
Hardware-virutalized CPU currently have the following limitations:
* SE mode is not supported.
* PC events are not supported.
* Timing statistics are currently very limited. The current approach
simply scales the host cycles with a user-configurable factor.
* The simulated system must not contain any caches.
* Since cycle counts are approximate, there is no way to request an
exact number of cycles (or instructions) to be executed by the CPU.
* Hardware virtualized CPUs and gem5 CPUs must not execute at the
same time in the same simulator instance.
* Only single-CPU systems can be simulated.
* Remote GDB connections to the guest system are not supported.
Additionally, m5ops requires an architecture specific interface and
might not be supported.
