Some hypervisors such as VMWare ESXi 5.5 advertise support for
X86_FEATURE_APERFMPERF but then fill all MSR's with zeroes. In particular,
MSR_PLATFORM_INFO set to zero tricks the code that wants to know the base
clock frequency of the CPU (highest non-turbo frequency), producing a
division by zero when computing the ratio turbo_freq/base_freq necessary
for frequency invariant accounting.
It is to be noted that even if MSR_PLATFORM_INFO contained the appropriate
data, APERF and MPERF are constantly zero on ESXi 5.5, thus freq-invariance
couldn't be done in principle (not that it would make a lot of sense in a
VM anyway). The real problem is advertising X86_FEATURE_APERFMPERF. This
appears to be fixed in more recent versions: ESXi 6.7 doesn't advertise
that feature.
Fixes: 1567c3e346 ("x86, sched: Add support for frequency invariance")
Signed-off-by: Giovanni Gherdovich <ggherdovich@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200416054745.740-2-ggherdovich@suse.cz
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