From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Paolo Bonzini Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] Native Linux KVM tool for 3.1 Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:59:02 +0200 Message-ID: <4E2D6896.5010008@redhat.com> References: <4E2CA6DE.4040900@web.de> <1311580201.3446.30.camel@lappy> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-7; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Jan Kiszka , Pekka Enberg , mingo@elte.hu, avi@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, kvm@vger.kernel.org, gorcunov@gmail.com, asias.hejun@gmail.com, prasadjoshi124@gmail.com To: Sasha Levin Return-path: Received: from mail-yi0-f46.google.com ([209.85.218.46]:55130 "EHLO mail-yi0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751277Ab1GYM7I (ORCPT ); Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:59:08 -0400 In-Reply-To: <1311580201.3446.30.camel@lappy> Sender: kvm-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 07/25/2011 09:50 AM, Sasha Levin wrote: > Anthony had a talk on last years KVM forum regarding the QEMU threading > model (slide: > http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/7/70/2010-forum-threading-qemu.pdf) . > > It was suggested that the KVM part of QEMU is having a hard time > achieving the ideal threading model due to its need to support TCG - > something which has nothing to do with KVM itself. No, it is not having a hard time. The "foot in the door" that Anthony mentions has been part of QEMU and qemu-kvm for a long time (multi-threading is necessary to support SMP!) and works quite well. Historically, there were three main loops: 1) QEMU single-threaded; 2) QEMU multi-threaded; clean, but buggy, untested and bitrotting; 3) qemu-kvm multi-threaded, forked from (1), ugly but robust and widely deployed. In 0.15 the two multi-threaded versions have been unified by Jan Kiszka. I have even ported (2) to Windows with little or no pain; porting to Mac OS X interestingly is harder than Windows, because non-portable Linux assumptions about signal handling have crept in the code (to preempt the objections: they weren't just non-portabilities, they were latent bugs). Windows just does not have signals. :) So, right now, the only difference is that QEMU is still defaulting to the single-threaded main loop, while qemu-kvm enables multi-threading by default. In some time even QEMU will switch. Yes, this is of course worse than getting it right in the first place; Nobody is saying the opposite. Paolo