Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 00/50] tcg plugin support

[Pranith Kumar]

Hi Alex/Emilio,

I am really happy to see the progress you made on the plugin feature. Looking
forward to seeing it merged soon! Please CC me on future versions of the
patchset. I am happy to help review and contribute to this effort.

I have a few general comments from experience writing a very similar system
(qsim) below.

On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM Alex Bennée <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> This is v3 of the proposed plugins API for QEMU. As Emilio is busy
> having finished his time at Columbia I have volunteered to take the
> patch series forward. Emilio's RFC v2 was posted last year:
>
>   Subject: [RFC v2 00/38] Plugin support
>   Date: Sun,  9 Dec 2018 14:37:11 -0500
>   Message-Id: <address@hidden>
>

* Register and memory read/write API

  It would be great to have register and memory read/write API i.e., ability
  to read/write to registers/memory from within the callback. This gives the
  plugin ability to do system introspection. (Not sure if the current patchset
  implements this already).

* Register callbacks

  A callback needs to be invoked whenever a specified registers is read or
  written to.

* Where do new plugins live in the tree?

  The current source files in plugins (api, core etc.,) I think are better if
  moved to tcg/plugins/.  The various plugins we write would then live in the
  plugins/ folder instead of the current tests/plugin/ folder.

* Timer interrupts

  What I observed is that the system execution is affected by what you do in
  the callbacks because of timer interrupts. For example, if you spend time in
  the memory callback doing a bit of processing and writing to a file, you
  will see more timer interrupt instructions. One solution to this would be to
  use 'icount', but it does not work that well. I think we need to do
  something similar to what gdb does in debug mode. How would you handle MTTCG
  guests in that case?

  Another approach would be to offload callback generation to a separate
  plugin thread. The main thread will copy data required by a callback and
  invoke the callback asynchronously (std::async in C++ if you are familiar).

* Starting and stopping callback generation

  It would be great if we have a mechanism to dynamically start/stop callbacks
  when a sequence of code (magic instruction) is executed. This would be
  useful to annotate region-of-interest (ROI) in benchmarks to
generate callbacks.

  Also, the return value from a callback can be used to decide further course
  of action. For example, if our plugin needs 10000 callbacks, it can indicate
  to stop generating further callbacks in the return value of the callback
  once it got the necessary callbacks.

* State saving API

  An API to save the state of the VM from the plugin code.

Let me know your thoughts and any other ideas you might have.

Thanks,
--
Pranith