Re: Using All Cores of CPU on Snapdragon Processor during x86-to-ARM User Space Emulation

[Jakob Bohm]

On 13/05/2020 12:02, Alex Bennée wrote:
> Vijay Daita <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Hello
> >
> > It is my understanding that one would be unable to do x86-to-ARM user space
> > emulation while utilizing all cores because of x86 barriers.
> Actually the utilisation of multiple cores (often referred to at MTTCG)
> is a function of system emulation and you are correct for x86-on-ARM we
> don't enable MTTCG because we don't currently add barrier instructions
> to fully emulate the x86 memory model. However for linux-user we have
> always followed the guest threading model because the guest clone() is
> passed down to the host. However because the memory modelling isn't
> perfect you can run into problems because of the mismatch.
>
> > I wanted to
> > know if there is difference between what QEMU aims to do and using a
> > interpreter of sorts to convert x86 instructions directly to ARM
> > instructions so that when run on the system directly, the system can
> > decide, itself, how to apportion the task.
> This is what the TCG does - it translates guest instructions into groups
> of host instructions. We could insert the extra barriers for all loads
> and stores but the effect would be to cripple performance. In an ideal
> world we would only do these for the load/store instructions involved in
> inter-thread synchronisation operations but that's a fairly tricky
> problem to solve.
Especially because the x86 memory model traditionally has 
barrier/synchronization
instructions automatically push through their ordering to all other 
cores/CPUs,
and as a result, "barrier load" wasn't really a thing until CMPXCHG was
introduced in a later CPU generation than the basic sync instructions
(8086) and cache coherency mechanisms (80486).  In fact, the LOCK 
barrier prefix
triggers an #UD exception with most load instructions.

The one exception to this lack was instruction decoding, where certain 
commonly
used branch instructions were defined as implicitly picking up any 
changes in
instruction memory.  This of cause corresponds to the TCG checking for 
needed
retranslation of buffers at those points.

Additionally, x86 barriers generally guarantee total ordering relative 
to the
barrier operation of all memory accesses that occur before or after in 
program
order, which some other CPU families do not.

> > I am new to this, so sorry if
> > this doesn't make very much sense.
> >
> > Thank you


Enjoy

Jakob
--
Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S.  http://www.wisemo.com
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