KVM: Coalesced MMIO support

MMIO exits are more expensive in KVM or Xen than in QEMU because they 
involve, at least, privilege transitions.  However, MMIO write 
operations can be effectively batched if those writes do not have side 
effects.

Good examples of this include VGA pixel operations when in a planar 
mode.  As it turns out, we can get a nice boost in other areas too.  
Laurent mentioned a 9.7% performance boost in iperf with the coalesced 
MMIO changes for the e1000 when he originally posted this work for KVM.

Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>



git-svn-id: svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/qemu/trunk@5961 c046a42c-6fe2-441c-8c8c-71466251a162

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/cpu-all.h b/cpu-all.h
index fadf89cfc1..7102014c7b 100644
--- a/cpu-all.h
+++ b/cpu-all.h
@@ -973,6 +973,15 @@ void cpu_physical_sync_dirty_bitmap(target_phys_addr_t start_addr, target_phys_a
 void dump_exec_info(FILE *f,
                     int (*cpu_fprintf)(FILE *f, const char *fmt, ...));
 
+/* Coalesced MMIO regions are areas where write operations can be reordered.
+ * This usually implies that write operations are side-effect free.  This allows
+ * batching which can make a major impact on performance when using
+ * virtualization.
+ */
+void qemu_register_coalesced_mmio(target_phys_addr_t addr, ram_addr_t size);
+
+void qemu_unregister_coalesced_mmio(target_phys_addr_t addr, ram_addr_t size);
+
 /*******************************************/
 /* host CPU ticks (if available) */