Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/5] Slow-path for atomic instruction translation

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 06/05/2015 17:38, Alvise Rigo wrote:
> This patch series provides an infrastructure for atomic
> instruction implementation in QEMU, paving the way for TCG multi-threading.
> The adopted design does not rely on host atomic
> instructions and is intended to propose a 'legacy' solution for
> translating guest atomic instructions.
> 
> The underlying idea is to provide new TCG instructions that guarantee
> atomicity to some memory accesses or in general a way to define memory
> transactions. More specifically, a new pair of TCG instructions are
> implemented, qemu_ldlink_i32 and qemu_stcond_i32, that behave as
> LoadLink and StoreConditional primitives (only 32 bit variant
> implemented).  In order to achieve this, a new bitmap is added to the
> ram_list structure (always unique) which flags all memory pages that
> could not be accessed directly through the fast-path, due to previous
> exclusive operations. This new bitmap is coupled with a new TLB flag
> which forces the slow-path exectuion. All stores which take place
> between an LL/SC operation by other vCPUs in the same memory page, will
> fail the subsequent StoreConditional.
> 
> In theory, the provided implementation of TCG LoadLink/StoreConditional
> can be used to properly handle atomic instructions on any architecture.
> 
> The new slow-path is implemented such that:
> - the LoadLink behaves as a normal load slow-path, except for cleaning
>   the dirty flag in the bitmap. The TLB entries created from now on will
>   force the slow-path. To ensure it, we flush the TLB cache for the
>   other vCPUs
> - the StoreConditional behaves as a normal store slow-path, except for
>   checking the state of the dirty bitmap and returning 0 or 1 whether or
>   not the StoreConditional succeeded (0 when no vCPU has touched the
>   same memory in the mean time).
> 
> All those write accesses that are forced to follow the 'legacy'
> slow-path will set the accessed memory page to dirty.
> 
> In this series only the ARM ldrex/strex instructions are implemented.
> The code was tested with bare-metal test cases and with Linux, using
> upstream QEMU.
> 
> This work has been sponsored by Huawei Technologies Dusseldorf GmbH.
> 
> Alvise Rigo (5):
>   exec: Add new exclusive bitmap to ram_list
>   Add new TLB_EXCL flag
>   softmmu: Add helpers for a new slow-path
>   tcg-op: create new TCG qemu_ldlink and qemu_stcond instructions
>   target-arm: translate: implement qemu_ldlink and qemu_stcond ops

That's pretty cool.

Paolo