Re: [Qemu-devel] TCG icount interaction with timer deadlines

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Maydell" <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> To: "Paolo Bonzini" <pbonzini@redhat.com>
> Cc: "QEMU Developers" <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>, "Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>, "Richard Henderson"
> <rth@twiddle.net>, "Emilio G. Cota" <cota@braap.org>, "Pavel Dovgalyuk" <dovgaluk@ispras.ru>
> Sent: Thursday, April 5, 2018 7:35:56 PM
> Subject: Re: TCG icount interaction with timer deadlines
> 
> On 5 April 2018 at 18:07, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 05/04/2018 18:01, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >>  * however, if the guest reprograms the clock during the tcg_cpu_exec()
> >>    run, we don't do anything to cause us to stop earlier
> >
> > Anything that does this from the vCPU thread should be between
> > gen_icount_start and gen_icount_end.  (In fact, it's the entire reason
> > why cpu_io_recompile exists).
> 
> Yes, and this does cause us to do a cpu_io_recompile, which
> rebuilds the TB and does a longjmp. However:
>  (1) that only takes us out to cpu_exec(), which will then
>  just go ahead and execute the next TB, whereas the
>  recalculation of deadlines happens at the next level out
>  in tcg_cpu_exec()
>  (2) the io_recompile happens *before* the guest writes to
>  the timer register that reprograms the deadline, so even
>  if we recomputed deadlines after this longjmp they wouldn't
>  be correct

Right - that part would be handled here:

void qemu_timer_notify_cb(void *opaque, QEMUClockType type)
{
    if (!use_icount || type != QEMU_CLOCK_VIRTUAL) {
        qemu_notify_event();
        return;
    }

    if (!qemu_in_vcpu_thread() && first_cpu) {
        /* qemu_cpu_kick is not enough to kick a halted CPU out of
         * qemu_tcg_wait_io_event.  async_run_on_cpu, instead,
         * causes cpu_thread_is_idle to return false.  This way,
         * handle_icount_deadline can run.
         */
        async_run_on_cpu(first_cpu, do_nothing, RUN_ON_CPU_NULL);
    }
}

(called by timerlist_notify, called in turn by timerlist_rearm)
but that second "if" is too restrictive.  Maybe just removing
the first arm is enough.  All this was broken by MTTCG.

Paolo