Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH 13/26] cpus: only take BQL for sleeping threads

[Paolo Bonzini]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Hildenbrand" <address@hidden>
> To: "Paolo Bonzini" <address@hidden>, "Pavel Dovgalyuk" <address@hidden>, 
> address@hidden
> Cc: address@hidden, "peter maydell" <address@hidden>, "boost lists" 
> <address@hidden>,
> address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, "maria 
> klimushenkova"
> <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden, "alex bennee" 
> <address@hidden>
> Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2017 7:39:22 PM
> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 13/26] cpus: only take BQL for sleeping threads
> 
> On 02.11.2017 12:08, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > On 31/10/2017 12:26, Pavel Dovgalyuk wrote:
> >> From: Alex Bennée <address@hidden>
> >>
> >> Now the only real need to hold the BQL is for when we sleep on the
> >> cpu->halt conditional. The lock is actually dropped while the thread
> >> sleeps so the actual window for contention is pretty small. This also
> >> means we can remove the special case hack for exclusive work and
> >> simply declare that work no longer has an implicit BQL held. This
> >> isn't a major problem async work is generally only changing things in
> >> the context of its own vCPU. If it needs to work across vCPUs it
> >> should be using the exclusive mechanism or possibly taking the lock
> >> itself.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <address@hidden>
> >> Tested-by: Pavel Dovgalyuk <address@hidden>
> > 
> > At least cpu_throttle_thread would fail with this patch.
> > 
> > Also I am not sure if the s390 SIGP handlers are ready for this.
> > 
> 
> We have a global lock to the SIGP "facility". However we need the BQL in
> order to inject interrupts into CPUs (otherwise it would trigger an
> assert when injecting).
> 
> We inject Restart and Stop interrupts from run_on_cpu. This requires the
> BQL. So Paolo should be right, this change would break s390x.

I had some patches to access interrupt_request with the atomic builtins.  If
Pavel can first extract the other changes to the icount mechanism, I can
update them.

Paolo