Re: Possible nohz-full/RCU issue in arm64 KVM

Nicolas Saenz Julienne
2022-01-11T11:34:18Z

Hi Mark,

On Tue, 2022-01-04 at 16:39 +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 04:54:22PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > On 12/17/21 15:38, Mark Rutland wrote:
> > > For example kvm_guest_enter_irqoff() calls guest_enter_irq_off() which calls
> > > vtime_account_guest_enter(), but kvm_guest_exit_irqoff() doesn't call
> > > guest_exit_irq_off() and the call to vtime_account_guest_exit() is open-coded
> > > elsewhere. Also, guest_enter_irq_off() conditionally calls
> > > rcu_virt_note_context_switch(), but I can't immediately spot anything on the
> > > exit side that corresponded with that, which looks suspicious.
> >
> > rcu_note_context_switch() is a point-in-time notification; it's not strictly
> > necessary, but it may improve performance a bit by avoiding unnecessary IPIs
> > from the RCU subsystem.
> >
> > There's no benefit from doing it when you're back from the guest, because at
> > that point the CPU is just running normal kernel code.
>
> I see.
>
> My main issue here was just that it's really difficult to see how the
> entry/exit logic is balanced, and I reckon we can solve that by splitting
> guest_{enter,exit}_irqoff() into helper functions to handle the vtime
> accounting separately from the context tracking, so that arch code can do
> something like:
>
> guest_timing_enter_irqoff();
>
> guest_eqs_enter_irqoff();
> < actually run vCPU here >
> guest_eqs_exit_irqoff();
>
> < handle pending IRQs here >
>
> guest_timing_exit_irqoff();
>
> ... which I hope should work for RISC-V too.
>
> I've had a go, and I've pushed out a WIP to:
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mark/linux.git/log/?h=arm64/kvm/rcu

Had a look at the patches and they seeem OK to me.

Thanks!

--
Nicolás Sáenz