Hello !

I am looking to get some feedback and evaluation on a performance-related patch for Xen (XCP-ng 8.3 only).
This patch changes the memcpy implementation of Xen to use the "ERMS variant" (aka REP MOVSB) instead of the current REP MOVSQ+B implementation.
This is expected to perform better on the vast majority of Intel CPUs and modern AMD ones (Zen3+), but may perform worse on some older AMD CPUs.

This change may impact the performance of PV drivers (especially network).

You can find more details regarding this proposed change in : https://github.com/xcp-ng-rpms/xen/pull/54
This change may be reworked in the future to take more in account the specificities of each CPUs (e.g check presence of ERMS flag).

Keep in mind that this patched version is experimental and not officially supported.

Installation :

# Download repo file for XCP-ng 8.3
wget https://koji.xcp-ng.org/repos/user/8/8.3/xcpng-users.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/xcpng-users.repo

# Installing the patched Xen packages (you should see `.erms` packages)
yum update --enablerepo=xcp-ng-tae1

You can revert the changes by downgrading the Xen package with the ones in the default repos.

yum downgrade --disablerepo=xcp-ng-tae1 "xen-*"

TSnake41 opened this pull request in xcp-ng-rpms/xen

draft Use ERMS variant for memcpy #54

@plaidypus I don't know a lot about NUMA on Xen, but we have a part in the docs regarding that
https://docs.xcp-ng.org/compute/#numa-affinity

And also other documentation on the subject
https://xapi-project.github.io/new-docs/toolstack/features/NUMA/index.html
there was a design session regarding NUMA in latest Xen Summit : https://youtu.be/KoNwEYMlhyU?list=PLQMQQsKgvLnvjRgDnb-5T51e1kGHgs1SO

@tuxen said (https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/3652/no-free-virtual-function-found-vgpu-s7150/4?_=1731502751059)

After some digging, could be the case of a GPU firmware being incompatible with UEFI. Do you have any spare server for testing XCP-ng boot in legacy/BIOS with this GPU?

Perhaps it is the issue ?

@ohajek

Nov 13 11:30:21 xen03 kernel: [10188.720655] AMD IOMMUv2 driver by Joerg Roedel jroedel@suse.de
Nov 13 11:30:21 xen03 kernel: [10188.720656] AMD IOMMUv2 functionality not available on this system

This is expected, Dom0 Kernel (Linux) is not supposed to access the IOMMU when it is already used by Xen. To check if AMD-Vi is working, you need to check xl dmesg instead.

I took a quick look at kern_gim_compiled.txt, and it look likes it timed-out somewhere

Oct 23 20:49:32 xen03 kernel: [   80.657394]        gim error:(wait_cmd_complete:2387)  wait_cmd_complete -- time out after 0.003004460 sec
Oct 23 20:49:32 xen03 kernel: [   80.657408]        gim error:(wait_cmd_complete:2390)   Cmd = 0x17, Status = 0x0, cmd_Complete=0

3ms looks like a short timeout for me, but aside that, it looks like a driver(gim) or hardware issue

@abudef Note that even with this update, nested virtualization is still not really supported in XCP-ng 8.3.
It's there, you can enable it at your own risk. It broke due to some change in XAPI (even though Xen hypervisor had "support" for it).
It never actually got removed from Xen hypervisor (it was marked experimental in Xen 4.13 used in XCP-ng 8.2, it is also the case for Xen 4.17), although nothing really changed, it still has the same issues and limitations as said.

The current state of nested virtualization in Xen is quite clumsy and there are future plans to remake it properly from ground without taking shortcuts and have proper tests to back it.

Aside that, after some experiments, it seems that mostly nested EPT is incomplete/buggy, so your L1 hypervisor should not rely on it. You should add hap=0 to nested XCP-ng Xen cmdline. Beware that it will imply a pretty large performance hit, but I had more consistent results with this.
I am quite suprised that Windows works while Linux don't, maybe it is somewhat related to PV drivers ?

PCIe AER needs proper PCIe, which in practice needs Q35 chipset in the guest (or some other guest type/PCI passthrough way).

Q35 support is currently work in progress

I think it is the same MSI-X/PBA issues that may be partially fixed with https://gitlab.com/xen-project/xen/-/commit/b2cd07a0447bfa25e96ae13e190225b61a3670cb

However, with this device, MSI-X vector table and PBA are in a same page (vector table in 46800 and PBA in 46068) though, which is threated a bit differently

If PBA lives on the same page, discard writes and log a message.
Technically, writes outside of PBA could be allowed, but at this moment
the precise location of PBA isn't saved, and also no known device abuses
the spec in this way (at least yet).

But Coral appears to abuse this according to DKMS driver by having more than just MSI-X and PBA on a single page
https://github.com/google/gasket-driver/blob/main/src/apex_driver.c#L103-L140

Hello @hvm,

Can you give the output of xl dmesg in XCP-ng and of dmesg in the guest that has the issues ?
I have the impression that something is going wrong with reserved regions related to the SATA controller.