[PATCH v3 0/2] Detect stalls on guest vCPUS

From: Sebastian Ene
Date: Mon Apr 25 2022 - 09:42:35 EST


This adds a mechanism to detect stalls on the guest vCPUS by creating a
per CPU hrtimer which periodically 'pets' the host backend driver.
On a conventional watchdog-core driver, the userspace is responsible for
delivering the 'pet' events by writing to the particular /dev/watchdogN node.
In this case we require a strong thread affinity to be able to
account for lost time on a per vCPU basis.

This device driver acts as a soft lockup detector by relying on the host
backend driver to measure the elapesed time between subsequent 'pet' events.
If the elapsed time doesn't match an expected value, the backend driver
decides that the guest vCPU is locked and resets the guest. The host
backend driver takes into account the time that the guest is not
running. The communication with the backend driver is done through MMIO
and the register layout of the virtual watchdog is described as part of
the backend driver changes.

The host backend driver is implemented as part of:
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platform/crosvm/+/3548817

Changelog v3:
- cosmetic fixes, remove pr_info and version information
- improve description in the commit messag
- improve description in the Kconfig help section

Sebastian Ene (2):
dt-bindings: vm-wdt: Add qemu,vm-watchdog compatible
misc: Add a mechanism to detect stalls on guest vCPUs

.../devicetree/bindings/misc/vm-wdt.yaml | 44 ++++
drivers/misc/Kconfig | 12 +
drivers/misc/Makefile | 1 +
drivers/misc/vm-wdt.c | 207 ++++++++++++++++++
4 files changed, 264 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 Documentation/devicetree/bindings/misc/vm-wdt.yaml
create mode 100644 drivers/misc/vm-wdt.c

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2.36.0.rc2.479.g8af0fa9b8e-goog