stale TLB contents?

[Juergen Gross <juergen.gross@ts.fujitsu.com>]

Hi,

in our BS2000 guest running as HVM with EPT on x86_64 I have a problem which
seems to be related to stale TLB entries. I'm pretty sure I have invalidated
the TLB correctly after a change of the page tables, so I've searched for
possible problems in the hypervisor.

Xen is version 4.0 from SLES 11 SP1.

If I have read the sources correctly, neither INVLPG nor reload of CR3 are
handled by the hypervisor. And I didn't find an explicit clearing of the TLB
when a vcpu is switching physical cpus. So I think the following scenario is
possible:

- a vcpu is running on physical cpu A creating a TLB entry
- the vcpu is scheduled on physical cpu B, while physical cpu A is left idle
- on physical cpu B the TLB entry is cleared by INVLPG or load CR3
- the vcpu is scheduled on physical cpu A again (no other vcpu was active
   there in between), CR3 is same as when vcpu left cpu A
- the old TLB entry from the vcpu is still valid there!

Do I miss something?


Juergen

-- 
Juergen Gross                 Principal Developer Operating Systems
TSP ES&S SWE OS6                       Telephone: +49 (0) 89 3222 2967
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