[Xen-devel] Re: One (possible) x86 get_user_pages bug

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

On 01/31/2011 12:10 PM, Kaushik Barde wrote:
> << I'm not sure I follow you here.  The issue with TLB flush IPIs is that
> the hypervisor doesn't know the purpose of the IPI and ends up
> (potentially) waking up a sleeping VCPU just to flush its tlb - but
> since it was sleeping there were no stale TLB entries to flush.>>
>
> That's what I was trying understand, what is "Sleep" here? Is it ACPI sleep
> or some internal scheduling state? If vCPUs  are asynchronous to pCPU in
> terms of ACPI sleep state, then they need to synced-up. That's where entire
> ACPI modeling needs to be considered. That's where KVM may not see this
> issue. Maybe I am missing something here.

No, nothing to do with ACPI.  Multiple virtual CPUs (VCPUs) can be
multiplexed onto a single physical CPU (PCPU), in much the same way as
tasks are scheduled onto CPUs (identically, in KVM's case).  If a VCPU
is not currently running - either because it is simply descheduled, or
because it is blocked (what I slightly misleadingly called "sleeping"
above) in a hypercall, then it is not currently using any physical CPU
resources, including the TLBs.  In that case, there's no need to flush
that's VCPU's TLB entries, because there are none.

> << A "few hundred uSecs" is really very slow - that's nearly a
> millisecond.  It's worth spending some effort to avoid those kinds of
> delays.>>
>
> Actually, just checked IPIs are usually 1000-1500 cycles long (comparable to
> VMEXIT). My point is ideal solution should be where virtual platform
> behavior is closer to bare metal interrupts, memory, cpu state etc.. How to
> do it ? well that's what needs to be figured out :-)

The interesting number is not the raw cost of an IPI, but the overall
cost of the remote TLB flush.

    J

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