Re: [kvm-ppc-devel] [PATCH 2 of 2] Add PowerPC KVM guest

[Jerone Young <jyoung5@us.ibm.com>]

On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 13:19 -0500, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 April 2008 11:14:52 Jerone Young wrote:
> > Actually there appears to be a real problem with preempt notify in 44x.
> > I had no gotten a chance to get back with you about it. But I did some
> > investigation into it last week. We are following the same code paths
> > (common code) as x86 for preempt initalization. But I ran some tests
> > using preempt_disable() & preempt_enable() around some places where it
> > would make since (places where we disable interrupts), but just using
> > these functions whould cause the kernel to dump sig #11.
> 
> preempt_disable() and preempt_enable() are completely different, and I've 
> called those in the past and had no problems.

But it's not used anywhere in our code. And places where it can go ..
blows up big time. 

> 
> > The issue we have using function kvm_vcpu_block() that it is identical
> > to the code below, BUT it calls vcpu_put which then calls
> > preempt_notify_unregister() if it is called it will also sig #11.
> 
> If preempt_notify_unregister() dereferences a bad pointer, that shouldn't be 
> too difficult to track down.
> 
> > I'm not sure if what is going on honestly. Based on what I found it
> > should "just work" as we are initializing everything like x86 (we are
> > calling preempt_notify_init() in the same place). But for 44x any
> > preempt notfication calls blow up. So it appears calling anything
> > preempt notify related just blows up.
> >
> > This is a much bigger issue. I'm not sure that we honest want to be
> > stuck on this for long periods of time just to have a function call in a
> > place where we honestly do not absolutely need to have it at this time.
> > Plus I'm no expert with these scheduling frameworks. But givin what have
> > read around the net what we have now "should" work. It just doesn't.
> >
> > Something can come back to later. But for now we should just roll with
> > the working code.
> 
> No, I don't want to commit the hack. Sorry if I didn't make that clear before.

But this isn't a hack. You just want to use the common function. The
issue is there are a lot place we do not use the common function. Since
we really do need to get functional code up and going this is something
that can be postponed to be fixed. I will (and have been) take a look at
this to change this. But if we put a ton of emphasis on something that
isn't needed to get us going, then we will never move forward to solve
the real issues left to get this stuff usable. 


> 
> Accessing a bad pointer doesn't seem like a "much bigger issue" to me, so if 
> it's more complicated than that please elaborate.

The problem is the pointer is assigned by the frame work. I'm not
passing in any pointer to preempt. So something more is going on. I will
have to look into this more after I finish the next task. I don't
honestly know all that much about the preempt frame work. But I have
spent time trying to figure it out.


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