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KVM: eoi msi documentation
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Document the new EOI MSR. Couldn't decide whether this change belongs
conceptually on guest or host side, so a separate patch.

Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
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Michael S. Tsirkin authored and Avi Kivity committed Jun 25, 2012
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33 changes: 33 additions & 0 deletions Documentation/virtual/kvm/msr.txt
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Expand Up @@ -223,3 +223,36 @@ MSR_KVM_STEAL_TIME: 0x4b564d03
steal: the amount of time in which this vCPU did not run, in
nanoseconds. Time during which the vcpu is idle, will not be
reported as steal time.

MSR_KVM_EOI_EN: 0x4b564d04
data: Bit 0 is 1 when PV end of interrupt is enabled on the vcpu; 0
when disabled. Bit 1 is reserved and must be zero. When PV end of
interrupt is enabled (bit 0 set), bits 63-2 hold a 4-byte aligned
physical address of a 4 byte memory area which must be in guest RAM and
must be zeroed.

The first, least significant bit of 4 byte memory location will be
written to by the hypervisor, typically at the time of interrupt
injection. Value of 1 means that guest can skip writing EOI to the apic
(using MSR or MMIO write); instead, it is sufficient to signal
EOI by clearing the bit in guest memory - this location will
later be polled by the hypervisor.
Value of 0 means that the EOI write is required.

It is always safe for the guest to ignore the optimization and perform
the APIC EOI write anyway.

Hypervisor is guaranteed to only modify this least
significant bit while in the current VCPU context, this means that
guest does not need to use either lock prefix or memory ordering
primitives to synchronise with the hypervisor.

However, hypervisor can set and clear this memory bit at any time:
therefore to make sure hypervisor does not interrupt the
guest and clear the least significant bit in the memory area
in the window between guest testing it to detect
whether it can skip EOI apic write and between guest
clearing it to signal EOI to the hypervisor,
guest must both read the least significant bit in the memory area and
clear it using a single CPU instruction, such as test and clear, or
compare and exchange.

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