Re: Guest kernel hangs in smp kvm for older kernels prior to tscsync cleanup

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Wed Dec 19 2007 - 01:33:54 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
While the change mentions that it fixes a time warp bug, it also says it should be rare. So clearly kvm smp tsc handing is buggy. Ingo/Thomas, (or anybody else), do you have any insight as to what kvm can be doing wrong to trigger this behavior?

hm. Those time warps were really small, due to the small imperfections in the "sync up all CPUs to the same moment and do a WRMSR to clear all their TSCs" mechanism. I.e. at most a few usec time warps. I really dont know how that should result in udevd hanging. Can you debug udevd in any way?


Adding debug didn't help. I'll try some sysrq keys to see what the guest thinks is happening.

so the only thing that KVM might be doing incorrectly here is the emulation of the WRMSR that clears the TSC of each vcpu?

By inspection, it is correct. Of course I may be missing something, so I'll write a unit test for it. It should also be much slower than the native wrmsr.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/