KVM: Remove HIGH_RES_TIMERS dependency

Commit 92b5265d38f6a ("KVM: Depend on HIGH_RES_TIMERS") added a dependency
to high resolution timers with the comment:

    KVM lapic timer and tsc deadline timer based on hrtimer,
    setting a leftmost node to rb tree and then do hrtimer reprogram.
    If hrtimer not configured as high resolution, hrtimer_enqueue_reprogram
    do nothing and then make kvm lapic timer and tsc deadline timer fail.

That was back in 2012, where hrtimer_start_range_ns() would do the
reprogramming with hrtimer_enqueue_reprogram(). But as that was a nop with
high resolution timers disabled, this did not work. But a lot has changed
in the last 12 years.

For example, commit 49a2a07514a3a ("hrtimer: Kick lowres dynticks targets on
timer enqueue") modifies __hrtimer_start_range_ns() to work with low res
timers. There's been lots of other changes that make low res work.

ChromeOS has tested this before as well, and it hasn't seen any issues
with running KVM with high res timers disabled.  There could be problems,
especially at low HZ, for guests that do not support kvmclock and rely
on precise delivery of periodic timers to keep their clock running.
This can be the APIC timer (provided by the kernel), the RTC (provided
by userspace), or the i8254 (choice of kernel/userspace).  These guests
are few and far between these days, and in the case of the APIC timer +
Intel hosts we can use the preemption timer (which is TSC-based and has
better latency _and_ accuracy).

In KVM, only x86 is requiring CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS; perhaps a "depends
on HIGH_RES_TIMERS || EXPERT" could be added to virt/kvm, or a pr_warn
could be added to kvm_init if HIGH_RES_TIMERS are not enabled.  But in
general, it seems that there must be other code in the kernel (maybe
sound/?) that is relying on having high-enough HZ or hrtimers but that's
not documented anywhere.  Whenever you disable it you probably need to
know what you're doing and what your workload is; so the dependency is
not particularly interesting, and we can just remove it.

Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt (Google) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Message-ID: <20240821095127.45d17b19@gandalf.local.home>
[Added the last two paragraphs to the commit message. - Paolo]
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>

diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/Kconfig b/arch/x86/kvm/Kconfig
index faed96e33e38256b57dfd6079188007aca82e302..730c2f34d3479676224d0268a5969002798d98d1 100644 (file)
--- a/arch/x86/kvm/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/x86/kvm/Kconfig
@@ -19,7 +19,6 @@ if VIRTUALIZATION
 
 config KVM
        tristate "Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support"
-       depends on HIGH_RES_TIMERS
        depends on X86_LOCAL_APIC
        select KVM_COMMON
        select KVM_GENERIC_MMU_NOTIFIER