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The document introduces AMD's Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller (AVIC), a hardware enhancement for efficient virtualization of APIC functionality in AMD's SVM architecture. AVIC allows guest operating systems to access APIC registers directly, improving performance by reducing the overhead associated with interrupt delivery and scheduling. Key components include the virtual APIC, physical and logical ID tables, and a doorbell mechanism for delivering interrupts to specific physical cores.


























Introduction of Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller (AVIC) at XenSummit 2012 by Wei Huang.
Definition of AVIC as a virtual APIC with hardware acceleration, enhancing AMD SVM architecture.
Overview of the presentation agenda including motivation, architecture, hypervisor design, and summary.
Local APIC's role in managing interrupts within x86 SMP systems, including types of interrupt sources.
Details on various individual LAPIC registers influencing system operations.
Challenges of LAPIC performance in virtual environments, detailing issues with APIC accesses and interrupts.
AVIC's architectural components that provide direct APIC access, enhance mapping, and improve interrupt delivery.
Details on vAPIC and its backing page with memory allocations for context in a virtual environment.
Four access actions for guest APIC, defining behaviors and performance implications in virtualization.
Critical areas of performance acceleration targeting TPR, EOI, and ICRL writes.
The hypervisor’s management of VCPUs utilizing the physical and logical APIC ID tables for scheduling.
Functionality of the physical APIC ID table in routing virtual interrupts to appropriate physical cores.
Mapping between guest logical to physical APIC IDs for proper interrupt routing.
Doorbell as a mechanism for sending guest interrupts and IOMMU's role in AVIC architecture.
Key design elements for hypervisors implementing AVIC, focusing on initialization and running processes.
Allocation of necessary AVIC tables in physical memory for guest VM management.
New VMEXITs for handling specific scenarios in AVIC context, focusing on IPI delivery failures.
Summary emphasizing AVIC as a hardware extension for APIC acceleration targeting key performance improvements.
Open floor for questions regarding the AVIC presentation.
Trademark attribution for AMD and related entities, disclaimer regarding names used.