The cpuidle_haltpoll governor, in conjunction with the haltpoll cpuidle
driver, allows guest vcpus to poll for a specified amount of time before
halting.
This provides the following benefits to host side polling:
1) The POLL flag is set while polling is performed, which allows
a remote vCPU to avoid sending an IPI (and the associated
cost of handling the IPI) when performing a wakeup.
2) The VM-exit cost can be avoided.
The downside of guest side polling is that polling is performed
even with other runnable tasks in the host.
Results comparing halt_poll_ns and server/client application
where a small packet is ping-ponged: