perf: Add APIs to create/release mediated guest vPMUs

Currently, exposing PMU capabilities to a KVM guest is done by emulating
guest PMCs via host perf events, i.e. by having KVM be "just" another user
of perf.  As a result, the guest and host are effectively competing for
resources, and emulating guest accesses to vPMU resources requires
expensive actions (expensive relative to the native instruction).  The
overhead and resource competition results in degraded guest performance
and ultimately very poor vPMU accuracy.

To address the issues with the perf-emulated vPMU, introduce a "mediated
vPMU", where the data plane (PMCs and enable/disable knobs) is exposed
directly to the guest, but the control plane (event selectors and access
to fixed counters) is managed by KVM (via MSR interceptions).  To allow
host perf usage of the PMU to (partially) co-exist with KVM/guest usage
of the PMU, KVM and perf will coordinate to a world switch between host
perf context and guest vPMU context near VM-Enter/VM-Exit.

Add two exported APIs, perf_{create,release}_mediated_pmu(), to allow KVM
to create and release a mediated PMU instance (per VM).  Because host perf
context will be deactivated while the guest is running, mediated PMU usage
will be mutually exclusive with perf analysis of the guest, i.e. perf
events that do NOT exclude the guest will not behave as expected.

To avoid silent failure of !exclude_guest perf events, disallow creating a
mediated PMU if there are active !exclude_guest events, and on the perf
side, disallowing creating new !exclude_guest perf events while there is
at least one active mediated PMU.

Exempt PMU resources that do not support mediated PMU usage, i.e. that are
outside the scope/view of KVM's vPMU and will not be swapped out while the
guest is running.

Guard mediated PMU with a new kconfig to help readers identify code paths
that are unique to mediated PMU support, and to allow for adding arch-
specific hooks without stubs.  KVM x86 is expected to be the only KVM
architecture to support a mediated PMU in the near future (e.g. arm64 is
trending toward a partitioned PMU implementation), and KVM x86 will select
PERF_GUEST_MEDIATED_PMU unconditionally, i.e. won't need stubs.

Immediately select PERF_GUEST_MEDIATED_PMU when KVM x86 is enabled so that
all paths are compile tested.  Full KVM support is on its way...

[sean: add kconfig and WARNing, rewrite changelog, swizzle patch ordering]
Suggested-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Kan Liang <kan.liang@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Mingwei Zhang <mizhang@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Tested-by: Xudong Hao <xudong.hao@intel.com>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20251206001720.468579-5-seanjc@google.com

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig
index fa79feb8fe57..6628ff295cb8 100644
--- a/init/Kconfig
+++ b/init/Kconfig
@@ -2061,6 +2061,10 @@ config GUEST_PERF_EVENTS
 	bool
 	depends on HAVE_PERF_EVENTS
 
+config PERF_GUEST_MEDIATED_PMU
+	bool
+	depends on GUEST_PERF_EVENTS
+
 config PERF_USE_VMALLOC
 	bool
 	help