Add an on-by-default module param, enable_virt_at_load, to let userspace
force virtualization to be enabled in hardware when KVM is initialized,
i.e. just before /dev/kvm is exposed to userspace. Enabling virtualization
during KVM initialization allows userspace to avoid the additional latency
when creating/destroying the first/last VM (or more specifically, on the
0=>1 and 1=>0 edges of creation/destruction).
Now that KVM uses the cpuhp framework to do per-CPU enabling, the latency
could be non-trivial as the cpuhup bringup/teardown is serialized across
CPUs, e.g. the latency could be problematic for use case that need to spin
up VMs quickly.
Prior to commit 10474ae894 ("KVM: Activate Virtualization On Demand"),
KVM _unconditionally_ enabled virtualization during load, i.e. there's no
fundamental reason KVM needs to dynamically toggle virtualization. These
days, the only known argument for not enabling virtualization is to allow
KVM to be autoloaded without blocking other out-of-tree hypervisors, and
such use cases can simply change the module param, e.g. via command line.
Note, the aforementioned commit also mentioned that enabling SVM (AMD's
virtualization extensions) can result in "using invalid TLB entries".
It's not clear whether the changelog was referring to a KVM bug, a CPU
bug, or something else entirely. Regardless, leaving virtualization off
by default is not a robust "fix", as any protection provided is lost the
instant userspace creates the first VM.
Reviewed-by: Chao Gao <chao.gao@intel.com>
Acked-by: Kai Huang <kai.huang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Kai Huang <kai.huang@intel.com>
Tested-by: Farrah Chen <farrah.chen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
Message-ID: <20240830043600.127750-8-seanjc@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
b4886fab6f