Re: [PATCH 5/5] ioeventfd: Introduce KVM_IOEVENTFD_FLAG_SOCKET

Pekka Enberg
2011-07-14T13:17:14Z

On Thu, 2011-07-14 at 16:05 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 07/14/2011 04:00 PM, Sasha Levin wrote:
> > >
> > > Why? virtio is mature. It's not some early boot thing which fails and
> > > kills the guest. Even if you get an oops, usually the guest is still alive.
> >
> > virtio is mature, /tools/kvm isn't :)
> > >
> > > > It's not just virtio which can fail running on virtio-console, it's also
> > > > the threadpool, the eventfd mechanism and even the PCI management
> > > > module. You can't really debug it if you can't depend on your debugging
> > > > mechanism to properly work.
> > >
> > > Wait, those are guest things, not host things.
> >
> > Yes, as you said in the previous mail, both KVM and virtio are very
> > stable. /tools/kvm was the one who was being debugged most of the time.
>
> I still don't follow. The guest oopses? dmesg | less. An issue with
> tools/kvm? gdb -p `pgrep kvm`.

When I was debugging tools/kvm virtio code, I used to 'instrument' the
guest kernel with printk() calls which helped a lot.

Also, a bug in tools/kvm can manifest in many interesting ways in the
guest kernel during boot, for example. You can't do dmesg then and gdb
won't save you. I think you've lived too long in the table KVM and Qemu
land to remember how important reliable printk() is for development.

Pekka