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Re: [Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH 3/5] x86/pvclock: add vsyscall implementation



On 10/06/2009 08:46 PM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

Instead of using vgetcpu() and rdtsc() independently, you can use
rdtscp to read both atomically.  This removes the need for the preempt
notifier.
rdtscp first appeared on Intel with Nehalem, so we need to support older
Intel chips.

We can support them by falling back to the kernel. I'm a bit worried about the kernel playing with the hypervisor's version field. It's better to introduce yet a new version for the kernel, and check both.

You could use rdscp to get (tsc,cpu) atomically, but that's not
sufficient to be able to get a consistent snapshot of (tsc, time_info)
because it doesn't give you the pvclock_vcpu_time_info version number.
If TSC_AUX contained that too, it might be possible.  Alternatively you
could compare the tsc with pvclock.tsc_timestamp, but unfortunately the
ABI doesn't specify that tsc_timestamp is updated in any particular
order compared to the rest of the fields, so you still can't use that to
get a consistent snapshot (we can revise the ABI, of course).

So either way it doesn't avoid the need to iterate.  vgetcpu will use
rdtscp if available, but I agree it is unfortunate we need to do a
redundant rdtsc in that case.


def try_pvclock_vtime():
  tsc, p0 = rdtscp()
  v0 = pvclock[p0].version
  tsc, p = rdtscp()
  t = pvclock_time(pvclock[p], tsc)
  if p != p0 or pvclock[p].version != v0:
     raise Exception("Processor or timebased change under our feet")
  return t

def pvclock_time():
  while True:
    try:
       return try_pvlock_time()
    except:
       pass

So, two rdtscps and two compares.

+    for (cpu = 0; cpu<   nr_cpu_ids; cpu++)
+        pvclock_vsyscall_time_info[cpu].version = ~0;
+
+    __set_fixmap(FIX_PVCLOCK_TIME_INFO,
__pa(pvclock_vsyscall_time_info),
+             PAGE_KERNEL_VSYSCALL);
+
+    preempt_notifier_init(&pvclock_vsyscall_notifier,
+&pvclock_vsyscall_preempt_ops);
+    preempt_notifier_register(&pvclock_vsyscall_notifier);
+
preempt notifiers are per-thread, not global, and will upset the cycle
counters.
Ah, so I need to register it on every new thread?  That's a bit awkward.

It's used to manage processor registers, much like the fpu. If a thread uses a register that's not saved and restored by the normal context switch code, it can register a preempt notifier to do that instead.

This is intended to satisfy the cycle-counters who want to do
gettimeofday a million times a second, where I guess the tradeoff of
avoiding a pile of syscalls is worth a bit of context-switch overhead.

It's sufficient to increment a version counter on thread migration, no need to do it on context switch.

--
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to 
panic.


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