Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: segmentation fault in qemu-kvm-0.14.0

[Corentin Chary]

Re-reading:

>> So we are calling a IOHandlerRecord::fd_write handler that is NULL.
>> Looking at qemu_set_fd_handler2, this may happen if that function is
>> called for an existing io-handler entry with non-NULL write handler,
>> passing a NULL write and a non-NULL read handler. And all this without
>> the global mutex held.

When using the vnc thread, nothing in the vnc thread will never be
called directly by an IO-handler. So I don't really how in would
trigger this.
And since there is a lock for accessing the output buffer (and the
network actually), there should not be any race condition either.

So the real issue, is that qemu_set_fd_handler2() is called outside of
the main thread by those two vnc_write() and vnc_flush() calls,
without any kind of locking.

> In upstream qemu, the latter - if it exists (which is not the case in
> non-io-thread mode).
> In qemu-kvm, those locks are yet unused. Rather the code in qemu-kvm.c
> implements the global lock.

So there is currently no lock for that when io-thread is disabled :/.
Spice also seems to project this kind of thing with
qemu_mutex_lock_iothread().

Maybe qemu_mutex_lock_iothread() should also be defined when
CONFIG_VNC_THREAD=y ?

> But I'm also not sure about vnc_send_framebuffer_update. Someone has to
> go through the threaded vnc code again, very thoroughly. It looks fragile.

while vnc-thread is enabled vnc_send_framebuffer_update() will always
call vnc_write() with csock = -1 in a temporary buffer. Check
vnc_async_encoding_start() and vnc_async_encoding_end(), they provide
a kind of "sandbox" that prevent the thread to write anything the
main-thread will use. You can also see that as a "transaction": the
thread compute the update in a temporary buffer, and only send it to
the network (real vnc_write calls with csock correctly set) once it's
successfully finished.

The is only two functions calls that break this isolation are the two
that I pointed out earlier.

-- 
Corentin Chary
http://xf.iksaif.net