X86 interrupt handling update:
Support for posted interrupts on bare metal
Posted interrupts is a virtualization feature which allows to inject
interrupts directly into a guest without host interaction. The VT-d
interrupt remapping hardware sets the bit which corresponds to the
interrupt vector in a vector bitmap which is either used to inject the
interrupt directly into the guest via a virtualized APIC or in case
that the guest is scheduled out provides a host side notification
interrupt which informs the host that an interrupt has been marked
pending in the bitmap.
This can be utilized on bare metal for scenarios where multiple
devices, e.g. NVME storage, raise interrupts with a high frequency. In
the default mode these interrupts are handles independently and
therefore require a full roundtrip of interrupt entry/exit.
Utilizing posted interrupts this roundtrip overhead can be avoided by
coalescing these interrupt entries to a single entry for the posted
interrupt notification. The notification interrupt then demultiplexes
the pending bits in a memory based bitmap and invokes the corresponding
device specific handlers.
Depending on the usage scenario and device utilization throughput
improvements between 10% and 130% have been measured.
As this is only relevant for high end servers with multiple device
queues per CPU attached and counterproductive for situations where
interrupts are arriving at distinct times, the functionality is opt-in
via a kernel command line parameter.