perf/x86/intel: Avoid checkpointed counters causing excessive TSX aborts

With checkpointed counters there can be a situation where the counter
is overflowing, aborts the transaction, is set back to a non overflowing
checkpoint, causes interupt. The interrupt doesn't see the overflow
because it has been checkpointed.  This is then a spurious PMI, typically with
a ugly NMI message.  It can also lead to excessive aborts.

Avoid this problem by:

- Using the full counter width for counting counters (earlier patch)

- Forbid sampling for checkpointed counters. It's not too useful anyways,
  checkpointing is mainly for counting. The check is approximate
  (to still handle KVM), but should catch the majority of cases.

- On a PMI always set back checkpointed counters to zero.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1378438661-24765-2-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
This commit is contained in:
Andi Kleen 2013-09-05 20:37:38 -07:00 • committed by Ingo Molnar
commit 2dbf0116aa