Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/7] Safe watch and breakpoint manipulation

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

> > The patch series changes things in stages.
> >
> > First we move the break/watchpoints into an array which is more
> > amenable to RCU control that the QLIST. We then control the life time
> > of references to break/watchpoint data by removing long held
> > references in the target code and getting information when needed from
> > the core. Then we stop dynamically allocation the watch/breakpoint
> > data and store it directly in the array which makes iteration across
> > the list a bit more cache friendly than referenced pointers. Finally
> > addition and removal of elements of the array is put under RCU
> > control. This ensures there is always a safe array of data to check
> > in the run-loop.
> 
> I a little bit unsure if we really want to complicate things with RCU.
> Why don't we simply protect the lists with a mutex given that there's no
> contention expected? BTW, as it comes to debugging, I suppose we don't
> expect great performance anyway.

Mutexes do introduce some overhead.  The breakpoints list are mostly touched
during translation, but watchpoints aren't so we could use tb_lock for
breakpoints and a separate per-CPU mutex for watchpoints.  That could
indeed work.

Paolo