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authorMichael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>2012-06-24 19:24:49 +0300
committerAvi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>2012-06-25 12:40:34 +0300
commitc1af87dc96cd0f8f17694d0cd9be01b80b2c7a6a (patch)
treedf243a9a8ac7c5d4e825a37f8afb1bdc9eb09924 /Documentation/virtual/kvm
parentd0a69d6321ca759bb8d47803d06ba8571ab42d07 (diff)
KVM: eoi msi documentation
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>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/virtual/kvm')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/virtual/kvm/msr.txt33
1 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/msr.txt b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/msr.txt
index 96b41bd97523..730471048583 100644
--- a/Documentation/virtual/kvm/msr.txt
+++ b/Documentation/virtual/kvm/msr.txt
@@ -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.