Re: [Xen-devel] memguard_guard_stack()

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 1 May 2006, at 15:09, Keir Fraser wrote:

> How many CPUs were in the system? That code path was rather dodgy: the 
> function forcibly enabled interrupts and so a single CPU could nest in 
> that function up to (NR_CPUS-1) times which, if you had say 32 CPUs in 
> the system could certainly cause problems. I don't think it's 
> indicative of a wider problem in Xen -- for most interrupts (ones 
> bound to a guest) we don't even reenable interrupt delivery while 
> handling them, so nested ISRs in Xen are impossible.
> I would like to understand exactly what happened in the context of 
> your IPI storm (it *is* the machine restart bug we're talking about, 
> right?) -- if you had much fewer than 32 CPUs then I need to check 
> exactly how much stack an invocation of machine_restart() uses.
Actually the behaviour is worse than I thought -- it was possible to 
build up stack frames unboundedly (think CPU1 execute 
machine_restart(), IPIs CPU2 executes machine_restart(), IPIs CPU1 
.....). It was essentially a race to see if CPU0 could smp_send_stop() 
and quiesce the other CPUs before they blew up their stacks. :-)
Case closed.

 -- Keir


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