Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] scsi: esp: Improve consistency of RSTAT, RSEQ, and RINTR

[Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 11:56:39AM +0000, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On 29/11/2018 09:58, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
> > On 28/11/18 22:56, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> >> The guest OS reads RSTAT, RSEQ, and RINTR, and expects those registers
> >> to reflect a consistent state. However, it is possible that the registers
> >> can change after RSTAT was read, but before RINTR is read.
> >>
> >> Guest OS		qemu
> >> --------		----
> >> Read RSTAT
> >> 			esp_command_complete()
> >> 			 RSTAT = STAT_ST
> >> 			 esp_dma_done()
> >> 			  RSTAT |= STAT_TC
> >> 			  RSEQ = 0
> >> 			  RINTR = INTR_BS
> >>
> >> Read RSEQ
> >> Read RINTR		RINTR = 0
> >> 			RSTAT &= ~STAT_TC
> >> 			RSEQ = SEQ_CD
> >>
> >> The guest OS would then try to handle INTR_BS combined with an old
> >> value of RSTAT. This sometimes resulted in lost events, spurious
> >> interrupts, guest OS confusion, and stalled SCSI operations.
> > 
> > The question is, why was the guest running the interrupt routine before
> > STAT_INT was set in RSTAT?  The code in esp_raise_irq seems good:
> > 
> >     if (!(s->rregs[ESP_RSTAT] & STAT_INT)) {
> >         s->rregs[ESP_RSTAT] |= STAT_INT;
> >         qemu_irq_raise(s->irq);
> >         trace_esp_raise_irq();
> >     }
> > 
> > Paolo
> 
> This patch is very interesting, as I have a long-running regression trying to boot
> NextSTEP 3.3 on qemu-system-sparc which I eventually bisected down to the commit that
> turned on iothread by default in QEMU.
> 
Makes me wonder: Is there a means to hold up processing esp_command_complete()
until a pending interrupt has been handled ? That might be a cleaner solution.
I could try to implement that in the driver, but maybe there is a means to do
that using the infrastructure.

Thanks,
Guenter

> The symptom is that ESP SCSI requests hang/timeout before the kernel is able to get
> to the userspace installer: however if you launch QEMU with "taskset –cpu-list 1
> qemu-system-sparc ..." then it works and you can complete the installation.
> 
> So certainly this suggests that there is a race condition still present in ESP
> somewhere. I've given this patch a spin, and in a few quick tests here I was able to
> consistently get further in kernel boot, but it still doesn't completely solve issue
> for me :/
> 
> 
> ATB,
> 
> Mark.