• Josh Poimboeuf's avatar
    cpu/hotplug: Fix "SMT disabled by BIOS" detection for KVM · b284909a
    Josh Poimboeuf authored
    With the following commit:
    
      73d5e2b4 ("cpu/hotplug: detect SMT disabled by BIOS")
    
    ... the hotplug code attempted to detect when SMT was disabled by BIOS,
    in which case it reported SMT as permanently disabled.  However, that
    code broke a virt hotplug scenario, where the guest is booted with only
    primary CPU threads, and a sibling is brought online later.
    
    The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to reliably
    distinguish between the HW "SMT disabled by BIOS" case and the virt
    "sibling not yet brought online" case.  So the above-mentioned commit
    was a bit misguided, as it permanently disabled SMT for both cases,
    preventing future virt sibling hotplugs.
    
    Going back and reviewing the original problems which were attempted to
    be solved by that commit, when SMT was disabled in BIOS:
    
      1) /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control showed "on" instead of
         "notsupported"; and
    
      2) vmx_vm_init() was incorrectly showing the L1TF_MSG_SMT warning.
    
    I'd propose that we instead consider #1 above to not actually be a
    problem.  Because, at least in the virt case, it's possible that SMT
    wasn't disabled by BIOS and a sibling thread could be brought online
    later.  So it makes sense to just always default the smt control to "on"
    to allow for that possibility (assuming cpuid indicates that the CPU
    supports SMT).
    
    The real problem is #2, which has a simple fix: change vmx_vm_init() to
    query the actual current SMT state -- i.e., whether any siblings are
    currently online -- instead of looking at the SMT "control" sysfs value.
    
    So fix it by:
    
      a) reverting the original "fix" and its followup fix:
    
         73d5e2b4 ("cpu/hotplug: detect SMT disabled by BIOS")
         bc2d8d26 ("cpu/hotplug: Fix SMT supported evaluation")
    
         and
    
      b) changing vmx_vm_init() to query the actual current SMT state --
         instead of the sysfs control value -- to determine whether the L1TF
         warning is needed.  This also requires the 'sched_smt_present'
         variable to exported, instead of 'cpu_smt_control'.
    
    Fixes: 73d5e2b4 ("cpu/hotplug: detect SMT disabled by BIOS")
    Reported-by: default avatarIgor Mammedov <imammedo@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJosh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Cc: Joe Mario <jmario@redhat.com>
    Cc: Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/e3a85d585da28cc333ecbc1e78ee9216e6da9396.1548794349.git.jpoimboe@redhat.com
    b284909a
fair.c 281 KB