Re: [GIT PULL] AlacrityVM guest drivers for 2.6.33

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Tue Dec 22 2009 - 14:26:35 EST


On 12/22/2009 09:15 PM, Gregory Haskins wrote:
On 12/22/09 1:53 PM, Avi Kivity wrote:
I asked why the irqfd/ioeventfd mechanisms are insufficient, and you did not reply.

BTW: the ioeventfd issue just fell through the cracks, so sorry about
that. Note that I have no specific issue with irqfd ever since the
lockless IRQ injection code was added.

ioeventfd turned out to be suboptimal for me in the fast path for two
reasons:

1) the underlying eventfd is called in atomic context. I had posted
patches to Davide to address that limitation, but I believe he rejected
them on the grounds that they are only relevant to KVM.

If you're not doing something pretty minor, you're better of waking up a thread (perhaps _sync if you want to keep on the same cpu). With the new user return notifier thingie, that's pretty cheap.

2) it cannot retain the data field passed in the PIO. I wanted to have
one vector that could tell me what value was written, and this cannot be
expressed in ioeventfd.


It would be easier to add data logging support to ioeventfd, if it was needed that badly.

--
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.

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