The VMI ROM has a mode where hypercalls can be queued and batched. This turns
out to be a significant win during context switch, but must be done at a
specific point before side effects to CPU state are visible to subsequent
instructions. This is similar to the MMU batching hooks already provided.
The same hooks could be used by the Xen backend to implement a context switch
multicall.
To explain a bit more about lazy modes in the paravirt patches, basically, the
idea is that only one of lazy CPU or MMU mode can be active at any given time.
Lazy MMU mode is similar to this lazy CPU mode, and allows for batching of
multiple PTE updates (say, inside a remap loop), but to avoid keeping some
kind of state machine about when to flush cpu or mmu updates, we just allow
one or the other to be active. Although there is no real reason a more
comprehensive scheme could not be implemented, there is also no demonstrated
need for this extra complexity.
Signed-off-by: Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
9226d125d9