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authorPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>2011-06-28 20:21:34 -0400
committerAvi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>2011-07-12 06:16:54 -0400
commitde56a948b9182fbcf92cb8212f114de096c2d574 (patch)
tree633ab73672aa2543b683686fc8fb023629c5f8f8 /Documentation/virtual
parent3c42bf8a717cb636e0ed2ed77194669e2ac3ed56 (diff)
KVM: PPC: Add support for Book3S processors in hypervisor mode
This adds support for KVM running on 64-bit Book 3S processors, specifically POWER7, in hypervisor mode. Using hypervisor mode means that the guest can use the processor's supervisor mode. That means that the guest can execute privileged instructions and access privileged registers itself without trapping to the host. This gives excellent performance, but does mean that KVM cannot emulate a processor architecture other than the one that the hardware implements. This code assumes that the guest is running paravirtualized using the PAPR (Power Architecture Platform Requirements) interface, which is the interface that IBM's PowerVM hypervisor uses. That means that existing Linux distributions that run on IBM pSeries machines will also run under KVM without modification. In order to communicate the PAPR hypercalls to qemu, this adds a new KVM_EXIT_PAPR_HCALL exit code to include/linux/kvm.h. Currently the choice between book3s_hv support and book3s_pr support (i.e. the existing code, which runs the guest in user mode) has to be made at kernel configuration time, so a given kernel binary can only do one or the other. This new book3s_hv code doesn't support MMIO emulation at present. Since we are running paravirtualized guests, this isn't a serious restriction. With the guest running in supervisor mode, most exceptions go straight to the guest. We will never get data or instruction storage or segment interrupts, alignment interrupts, decrementer interrupts, program interrupts, single-step interrupts, etc., coming to the hypervisor from the guest. Therefore this introduces a new KVMTEST_NONHV macro for the exception entry path so that we don't have to do the KVM test on entry to those exception handlers. We do however get hypervisor decrementer, hypervisor data storage, hypervisor instruction storage, and hypervisor emulation assist interrupts, so we have to handle those. In hypervisor mode, real-mode accesses can access all of RAM, not just a limited amount. Therefore we put all the guest state in the vcpu.arch and use the shadow_vcpu in the PACA only for temporary scratch space. We allocate the vcpu with kzalloc rather than vzalloc, and we don't use anything in the kvmppc_vcpu_book3s struct, so we don't allocate it. We don't have a shared page with the guest, but we still need a kvm_vcpu_arch_shared struct to store the values of various registers, so we include one in the vcpu_arch struct. The POWER7 processor has a restriction that all threads in a core have to be in the same partition. MMU-on kernel code counts as a partition (partition 0), so we have to do a partition switch on every entry to and exit from the guest. At present we require the host and guest to run in single-thread mode because of this hardware restriction. This code allocates a hashed page table for the guest and initializes it with HPTEs for the guest's Virtual Real Memory Area (VRMA). We require that the guest memory is allocated using 16MB huge pages, in order to simplify the low-level memory management. This also means that we can get away without tracking paging activity in the host for now, since huge pages can't be paged or swapped. This also adds a few new exports needed by the book3s_hv code. Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/virtual')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt17
1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt
index b2511360b8f5..e8875fef3eb8 100644
--- a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt
+++ b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt
@@ -1532,6 +1532,23 @@ Userspace can now handle the hypercall and when it's done modify the gprs as
1532necessary. Upon guest entry all guest GPRs will then be replaced by the values 1532necessary. Upon guest entry all guest GPRs will then be replaced by the values
1533in this struct. 1533in this struct.
1534 1534
1535 /* KVM_EXIT_PAPR_HCALL */
1536 struct {
1537 __u64 nr;
1538 __u64 ret;
1539 __u64 args[9];
1540 } papr_hcall;
1541
1542This is used on 64-bit PowerPC when emulating a pSeries partition,
1543e.g. with the 'pseries' machine type in qemu. It occurs when the
1544guest does a hypercall using the 'sc 1' instruction. The 'nr' field
1545contains the hypercall number (from the guest R3), and 'args' contains
1546the arguments (from the guest R4 - R12). Userspace should put the
1547return code in 'ret' and any extra returned values in args[].
1548The possible hypercalls are defined in the Power Architecture Platform
1549Requirements (PAPR) document available from www.power.org (free
1550developer registration required to access it).
1551
1535 /* Fix the size of the union. */ 1552 /* Fix the size of the union. */
1536 char padding[256]; 1553 char padding[256];
1537 }; 1554 };