Re: [PATCH v3] enable x2APIC without interrupt remapping under KVM

Eric W. Biederman
2009-06-30T19:36:02Z

Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> writes:

> On 06/30/2009 10:08 PM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>>> Can you elaborate? For kvm guests, the hardware is reasonably will implemented
>>> and if not we will fix it. We need not cripple a feature just because some
>>> hardware is broken.
>>>
>>
>> The short version is I don't know what work arounds we will ultimately
>> decide to deploy to work with real hardware.
>>
>> I have been seriously contemplating causing a cpu hot-unplug request
>> to fail if we are in ioapic mode and we have irqs routed to the cpu
>> that is being unplugged.
>>
>
> Well, obviously we need to disassociate any irqs from such a cpu. Could be done
> from the kernel or only enforced by the kernel.

Using the normal irq migration path we can move irqs off of a cpu reliably
there just aren't any progress guarantees.

>> Even with perfectly working hardware it is not possible in the general
>> case to migrate an ioapic irq from one cpu to another outside of an
>> interrupt handler without without risking dropping an interrupt.
>>
>
> Can't you generate a spurious interrupt immediately after the migration? An
> extra interrupt shouldn't hurt.

Nope. The ioapics can't be told to send an interrupt.

>> There is no general way to know you have seen the last interrupt
>> floating around your system. PCI ordering rules don't help because
>> the ioapics can potentially take an out of band channel.
>>
>
> Can you describe the problem scenario? an ioapic->lapic message delivered to a
> dead cpu?

Dropped irqs.. Driver hangs because it is waiting for an irq. Hardware
hangs because it is waiting for the cpu to process the irq.

Potentially we get a level triggered irq that is never acked by
the cpu that won't arm until the cpu send an ack, and we can't
send an ack from another cpu.

Eric