Re: Cleaning up the KVM clock

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 2:49 PM, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 22/12/2014 17:03, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> This is wrong.  The guest *kernel* might not see the intermediate
>> state because the kernel (presumably it disabled migration while
>> reading pvti), but the guest vdso can't do that and could very easily
>> observe pvti while it's being written.
>
> No.  kvm_guest_time_update is called by vcpu_enter_guest, while the vCPU
> is not running, so it's entirely atomic from the point of view of the guest.

Which vCPU?  Unless kvm_guest_time_update freezes all of the vcpus,
then there's a race:

vCPU 0 guest: __getcpu
vdso thread migrates to vCPU 1
vCPU 0 exits
host starts writing pvti for vCPU 0
vdso thread starts reading pvti
host finishes writing pvti for vCPU 0
vCPU 0 resumes
vdso migrates back to vCPU 0
__getcpu returns 0

and we fail.

>
>> I'll send patches for the whole mess, complete with lots of comments,
>> after I test them a bit today.
>
> Ok, some comments can certainly help the discussion.
>

I'm having a hard time testing, since KVM on 3.19-rc1 appears to be
entirely unusable.  No matter what I do, I get this very early in
guest boot:

KVM internal error. Suberror: 1
emulation failure
EAX=000dee58 EBX=00000000 ECX=00000000 EDX=00000cfd
ESI=00000059 EDI=00000000 EBP=00000000 ESP=00006fc4
EIP=000f17f4 EFL=00010012 [----A--] CPL=0 II=0 A20=1 SMM=0 HLT=0
ES =0010 00000000 ffffffff 00c09300 DPL=0 DS   [-WA]
CS =0008 00000000 ffffffff 00c09b00 DPL=0 CS32 [-RA]
SS =0010 00000000 ffffffff 00c09300 DPL=0 DS   [-WA]
DS =0010 00000000 ffffffff 00c09300 DPL=0 DS   [-WA]
FS =0010 00000000 ffffffff 00c09300 DPL=0 DS   [-WA]
GS =0010 00000000 ffffffff 00c09300 DPL=0 DS   [-WA]
LDT=0000 00000000 0000ffff 00008200 DPL=0 LDT
TR =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00008b00 DPL=0 TSS32-busy
GDT=     000f6c58 00000037
IDT=     000f6c96 00000000
CR0=60000011 CR2=00000000 CR3=00000000 CR4=00000000
DR0=0000000000000000 DR1=0000000000000000 DR2=0000000000000000
DR3=0000000000000000
DR6=00000000ffff0ff0 DR7=0000000000000400
EFER=0000000000000000
Code=e8 75 fc ff ff 89 f2 a8 10 89 d8 75 0a b9 74 17 ff ff ff d1 <5b>
5e c3 5b 5e e9 76 ff ff ff 57 56 53 8b 35 38 65 0f 00 85 f6 0f 88 be
00 00 00 0f b7 f6

and it sometimes comes with a lockdep splat, too.

--Andy

> Paolo



-- 
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC
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