Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH] Implement qemu_thread_yield for posix, use it in mttcg to handle EXCP_YIELD

[David Gibson]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 02:37:59PM +0000, Alex Bennée wrote:
> 
> Nicholas Piggin <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Alex Bennée's on December 20, 2019 11:11 pm:
> >>
> >> Nicholas Piggin <address@hidden> writes:
> >>
> >>> This is a bit of proof of concept in case mttcg becomes more important
> >>> yield could be handled like this. You can have by accident or deliberately
> >>> force vCPUs onto the same physical CPU and cause inversion issues when the
> >>> lock holder was preempted by the waiter. This is lightly tested but not
> >>> to the point of measuring performance difference.
> >>
> >> Sorry I'm so late replying.
> >
> > That's fine if you'll also forgive me :)
> >
> >> Really this comes down to what EXCP_YIELD semantics are meant to mean.
> >> For ARM it's a hint operation because we also have WFE which should halt
> >> until there is some sort of change of state. In those cases exiting the
> >> main-loop and sitting in wait_for_io should be the correct response. If
> >> a vCPU is suspended waiting on the halt condition doesn't it have the
> >> same effect?
> >
> > For powerpc H_CONFER, the vCPU does not want to wait for ever, but just
> > give up a some time slice on the physical CPU and allow other vCPUs to
> > run. But it's not necessary that one does run (if they are all sleeping,
> > the hypervisor must prevent deadlock). How would you wait on such a
> > conditon?
> 
> Isn't H_CONFER a hypercall rather than instruction though? In QEMU's TCG
> emulation case I would expect it just to exit to the (guest) hypervisor
> which then schedules the next (guest) vCPU. It shouldn't be something
> QEMU has to deal with.

That's true if you're emulating a whole system complete with
hypervisor under TCG, which is what the "pnv" machine type does.

However, a more common use of qemu is the "pseries" machine type,
which emulates only a guest (in the cpu architectural sense) with qemu
taking the place of the hypervisor as well as emulating the cpus.  In
that case the H_CONFER hypercall goes to qemu.

> If you are running QEMU as a KVM monitor this is still outside of it's
> scope as all the scheduling shenanigans are dealt with inside the
> kernel.
> 
> From QEMU's TCG point of view we want to concern ourselves with what the
> real hardware would do - which I think in this case is drop to the
> hypervisor and let it sort it out.

Right, but with the "pseries" machine type qemu *is* the hypervisor.

-- 
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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