Re: [KVM PATCH 1/2] KVM: Directly inject interrupts via irqfd

From: Gregory Haskins
Date: Thu Oct 22 2009 - 11:14:58 EST


Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 10/21/2009 05:42 PM, Gregory Haskins wrote:
>> I believe Avi, Michael, et. al. were in agreement with me on that design
>> choice. I believe the reason is that there is no good way to do EOI/ACK
>> feedback within the constraints of an eventfd pipe which would be
>> required for the legacy pin-type interrupts. Therefore, we won't even
>> bother trying. High-performance subsystems will use irqfd/msi, and
>> legacy emulation can use the existing injection code (which includes the
>> necessary feedback for ack/eoi).
>>
>>
>
> Right. But we don't actually prevent anyone using non-msi with irqfd,
> which can trigger the bad lock usage from irq context, with a nice boom
> afterwards. So we need to either prevent it during registration, or to
> gracefully handle it afterwards.
>

Yeah, I was thinking about that after I initially responded to Gleb.

I am thinking something along these lines:

Provide a function that lets you query a GSI for whether it supports
LOCKLESS or not. Then we can either do one of two things:

1) Check for the LOCKLESS attribute at irqfd registration, fail if not
present

2) Cache the LOCKLESS attribute in the irqfd structure, and either go
direct or defer to a workqueue depending on the flag.

Thoughts?
-Greg

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