For many years some users of assigned devices have reported worse
performance on AMD processors with NPT than on AMD without NPT,
Intel or bare metal.
The reason turned out to be that SVM is discarding the guest PAT
setting and uses the default (PA0=PA4=WB, PA1=PA5=WT, PA2=PA6=UC-,
PA3=UC). The guest might be using a different setting, and
especially might want write combining but isn't getting it
(instead getting slow UC or UC- accesses).
Thanks a lot to geoff@hostfission.com for noticing the relation
to the g_pat setting. The patch has been tested also by a bunch
of people on VFIO users forums.
Fixes: bd2b90fb56f835b4822008fbe398f1fea17d4da7 Fixes: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196409 Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> Tested-by: Nick Sarnie <commendsarnex@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@redhat.com>