Re: [Xen-devel] Foreign VCPU register change?

[Keir Fraser <keir.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

FWIW I would expect your approach to basically work. 

Except... Does your domctl do a vcpu_pause()/vcpu_unpause() on the vcpu? This will ensure that the vcpu is both fully de-scheduled, and all of its register state is synced back into its vcpu structure.

Otherwise you race the vcpu_sleep_nosync() -- and that’s assuming you also have a reason for that vcpu to sleep (e.g., non-zero pause counter), else vcpu_sleep_*() operations do nothing!

In short, your problems are almost certainly something to do with the subtleties of actually putting a vcpu properly to sleep.

 -- Keir


On 23/08/2012 18:37, "Cutter 409" <cutter409@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm making the register change directly from the hypervisor, inside of the domctl code.

It's a custom domctl that I've added. I'll look into what setcontext does after it modifies the register values, though.

Thank you!

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 1:34 PM, Keir Fraser <keir.xen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 23/08/2012 18:25, "Cutter 409" <cutter409@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> With Xen-4.1.2:
>
> I'm trying to change a register value in a paused vmx vcpu. The general
> process looks like this:
>
> 1. Some vmexit calls vcpu_sleep_nosync(v) on the vcpu
> 2. From dom0, I issue a domctl to change a register via
> v->arch.guest_context.user_reg, then vcpu_wake(v)

Which domctl? From dom0 userspace you can use the libxc functions
xc_vcpu_getcontext() and xc_vcpu_setcontext() to read/modify register state.

You can read the libxc sources to see what hypercall these map to, if you
don't want to use libxc for any reason.

 -- Keir

> However, the guest register does not seem to be changed when I do it this way.
> Is there something I need to do to mark the registers as "dirty" ? Is there a
> way to force the foreign vcpu to update the changed registers? Or maybe I just
> have to change the registers somewhere else?
>
> I've tried directly using vmcs_enter(v), __vmwrite(), vmcs_exit(v) also, but
> that doesn't seem to make a change either.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
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