Re: [PATCH V9 1/3] irq: Allow to pass the IRQF_TIMER flag with percpu irq request

Daniel Lezcano
2017-04-25T12:52:46Z

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 12:22:30PM +0200, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 11:49:27AM +0200, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > >
> > > The idle code is very much *not* aware of anything concerning that guest
> > > timer.
> >
> > Just for my own curiosity, if there are two VM (VM1 and VM2). VM1 sets a timer1
> > at and exits, VM2 runs and sets a timer2 at <time+delta>.
> >
> > The timer1 for VM1 is supposed to expire while VM2 is running. IIUC the virtual
> > timer is under control of VM2 and will expire at <time+delta>.
> >
> > Is the host wake up with the SW timer and switch in VM1 which in turn restores
> > the timer and jump in the virtual timer irq handler?
> >
> The thing that may be missing here is that a VCPU thread (more of which
> in a collection is a VM) is just a thread from the point of view of
> Linux, and whether or not a guest schedules a timer, should not effect
> the scheduler's decision to run a given thread, if the thread is
> runnable.
>
> Whenever we run a VCPU thread, we look at its timer state (in software)
> and calculate if the guest should see a timer interrupt and inject such
> a one (the hardware arch timer is not involved in this process at all).
>
> We use timers in exactly two scenarios:
>
> 1. The hardware arch timers are used to force an exit to the host when
> the guest programmed the timer, so we can do the calculation in
> software I mentioned above and inject a virtual software-generated
> interrupt when the guest expects to see one.
>
> 2. The guest goes to sleep (WFI) but has programmed a timer to be woken
> up at some point. KVM handles a WFI by blocking the VCPU thread,
> which basically means making the thread interruptible and putting it
> on a waitqueue. In this case we schedule a software timer to make
> the thread runnable again when the software timer fires (and the
> scheduler runs that thread when it wants to after that).
>
> If you have a VCPU thread from VM1 blocked, and you run a VCPU thread
> from VM2, then the VCPU thread from VM2 will program the hardware arch
> timer with the context of the VM2 VCPU thread while running, and this
> has nothing to do with the VCPU thread from VM1 at this point, because
> it relies on the host Linux time keeping infrastructure to become
> runnable some time in the future, and running a guest naturally doesn't
> mess with the host's time keeping.
>
> Hope this helps,

Yes, definitively. Thanks for the detailed description.

-- Daniel

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