Since 4.10, commit 8003c9ae20 (KVM: LAPIC: add APIC Timer
periodic/oneshot mode VMX preemption timer support), guests using
periodic LAPIC timers (such as FreeBSD 8.4) would see their timers
drift significantly over time.
Differences in the underlying clocks and numerical errors means the
periods of the two timers (hv and sw) are not the same. This
difference will accumulate with every expiry resulting in a large
error between the hv and sw timer.
This means the sw timer may be running slow when compared to the hv
timer. When the timer is switched from hv to sw, the now active sw
timer will expire late. The guest VCPU is reentered and it switches to
using the hv timer. This timer catches up, injecting multiple IRQs
into the guest (of which the guest only sees one as it does not get to
run until the hv timer has caught up) and thus the guest's timer rate
is low (and becomes increasing slower over time as the sw timer lags
further and further behind).
I believe a similar problem would occur if the hv timer is the slower
one, but I have not observed this.
Fix this by synchronizing the deadlines for both timers to the same
time source on every tick. This prevents the errors from accumulating.
Fixes: 8003c9ae20
Cc: Wanpeng Li <wanpeng.li@hotmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David Vrabel <david.vrabel@nutanix.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reviewed-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@tencent.com>
Signed-off-by: Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@redhat.com>
d8f2f498d9