Re: [PATCH 1/2] kvm tools: Respect ISR status in virtio header

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 2011-05-07 at 16:47 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > Can you anything in the virtio protocol implementation that would explain 
> > networking lags, which seem to be caused by guest notifications either not be 
> > sent or being missed?
> > 
> > In particular this sequence:
> > 
> > > while pending_requests:
> > >    a = get_next_request();
> > >    process_next_request(a);
> > 
> > is apparently not what Qemu uses - so maybe there's some latent bug or some 
> > silly oversight somewhere.
> > 
> > It is suboptimal and i agree with you that the better sequence should be 
> > implemented, but the above *should* work, yet it does not.
> 
> Yes, so the performance benefits of Asias' patch aren't the interesting
> part but the fact that it fixes a real bug in our tool.

It could be the same like the mutex_lock() change: that too seemed to 'fix' the 
latency bug but we still do not understand the root cause of the 'stuck 
ring-buffer' situation.

I.e. some sort of timing related condition which goes away spuriously when 
unrelated but timing-relevant changes are done to the code.

And we'll continue to see these problems on and off, in probably all virtio 
drivers. virtio-console might be suffering from it, virtio-blk, etc. etc.

I'd suggest freezing changes to this driver until this bug is analyzed 
correctly...

Thanks,

	Ingo