The 'nx_huge_pages' option, will force any executable page mapping to be
performed at 4KiB granularity and requires any existing overlapping
huge-page mapping to be also split in 4KiB chunks[1]. This is due to a HW
bug that doesn't affect our NFV use-cases.
The way a huge-page mapping is dropped is by simply deleting the EPT
entry and flushing TLB caches on all affected CPUs. Next vCPU access to
that address will trigger an EPT_VIOLATION, which will jump into the
host for it to handle the page-fault. In our specific case, this means
all isolated CPUs running oslat will hit an EPT_VIOLATION almost exactly
at the same time. Which is bad enough already, but, given our systems
might have a huge number of isolated CPUs, will also create a lot of
contention over the KVM MMU lock. This has been observed to trigger
~100us latency spikes while testing with oslat.
So let's disable the 'kvm.nx_huge_pages' module option.
[1] see kernel commit b7e8c8303ff28
Resolves: rhbz#1976825
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Saenz Julienne <nsaenzju@redhat.com>
e4a0e48886