Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 6/8] memory: Sanity check that no listeners remain on a destroyed AddressSpace

[David Gibson]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 02:19:50PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 13/05/2013 14:07, Peter Maydell ha scritto:
> > On 13 May 2013 12:48, David Gibson <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 12:10:10PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >>> Hmm, is this the ideal semantics? Typically the owner of the
> >>> MemoryListener isn't the owner of the AddressSpace so it isn't
> >>> necessarily in a position to guarantee that it can unregister
> >>> the listener before the address space is destroyed. In fact
> >>> as the listener API is currently documented, the filter
> >>> argument is just an optimisation to save the callbacks having
> >>> to filter out irrelevant information themselves.
> >>
> >> If so, then it's broken by design.  There's no guarantee that after an
> >> AddressSpace is destroyed another one won't be created at the same
> >> address (in fact, depending on your malloc() implementation, it could
> >> be very likely).  So references by pointer to an object *must* be
> >> removed before the object itself is freed.
> > 
> > Mmm. Looking through the code it turns out we don't actually
> > make use of the ability to pass NULL as a filter (except in
> > target-arm/kvm.c which was just me being lazy and not passing
> > in the system address space). Perhaps we should just drop that
> > capability, at which point you have a clearer "you are listening
> > on one AS and you must make sure you arrange to unregister before
> > that AS goes away" API definition?
> 
> Yes, that could be an idea.

Fine by me, that would also naturally lead to making the listener list
per-AS.  Either way, it doesn't alter the fact that pointer references
to the AS need to be removed before the AS is destroyed.

-- 
David Gibson                    | I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au  | minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
                                | _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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