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Is this just an EC2 problem, or does it affect any Xen/KVM guest?

I ran the test program on a Hyper-V VM running CentOS 7 and got the same result: 100 calls to the gettimeofday syscall. Conversely, I tested a vSphere guest (also running CentOS 7), which didn't call gettimeofday at all.

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It depends on a number of things. My DigitalOcean instance has this problem. The virtual machine I spun up on Oracle's Bare Metal Cloud platform doesn't (disclaimer, I work for the team).

>Is this just an EC2 problem, or does it affect any Xen/KVM guest?

Looks like it's how the Xen hypervisor works.

It is slower because it misses an optimization where you can get the current time without having to enter the kernel. The trick is using the RDTSC instruction, which is not a privileged instruction, so you can call it from userspace. The Time Stamp Counter is a 64 bit register (MSR actually), which gets incremented monotonically. You can get the current time by calibrating it against a known duration on boot or get the frequency from a system table first, then with a simple division and adding an offset. There are sone caveats though, like you have to check if the CPU has an invariant TSC using CPUID and every core has a separate register. I think the problem with XEN is that the VM could be moved across hypervisors or CPUs which would suddenly change the value of the counter. The latter could be mitigated by syncing the TSCs across cores (did I mention that they are writable?) and XEN supports emulating the RDTSC instruction too. I'm not sure how it's configured on AWS, so it may be perfectly safe or mostly safe.

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