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

Paul E. McKenney
2021-12-17T18:02:26Z

On Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 05:34:04PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 12/17/21 17:07, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Do scheduling-clock interrupts from guest mode have the "user" parameter
> > set? If so, that would keep RCU happy.
>
> No, thread is in supervisor mode. But after every interrupt (timer tick or
> anything), one of three things can happen:
>
> * KVM will go around the execution loop and invoke rcu_note_context_switch()
> again
>
> * or KVM will go back to user space

Here "user space" is a user process as opposed to a guest OS?

> * or the thread will be preempted
>
> and either will keep RCU happy as far as I understand.

Regardless of the answer to my question above, yes, these will keep
RCU happy. ;-)

Thanx, Paul