KVM AVIC Support Coming To Linux 4.7 For Improving AMD Virtualization Performance
AVIC is short for Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller and is designed for reducing interrupt overhead in virtualized environments. AVIC is AMD's alternative to Intel's APICv for APIC virtualization. AMD announced AVIC a few years ago but it's only with Carrizo processors and newer where it's supported.
The kernel patches for SVM AVIC do mention some performance figures for the benefit of this feature being implemented for KVM. The performance results show improvements in Hackbench for IPI performance but will yield smaller gains in performance for workloads not generating large numbers of interrupts.
AVIC is landing in Linux 4.7 via the KVM pull request. Aside from the KVM Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller support, there doesn't appear to be anything else too significant feature-wise as part of this 4.7 KVM pull request.
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