Re: [Xen-devel] Xen PVM: Strange lockups when running PostgreSQL load

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 14:28 +0100, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> In our case, certain processes were locking up, and it turned out that
> the kernel was issuing SCHOP_poll hypercalls (same the stack trace on
> your launchpad ticket) on its own spinlock IPI event channel
> (understandable, as its a spinlock), but with the event channel
> masked, so it would never wake up from the poll. 

I think (but you might want to check) that SCHEDOP_poll works (or is
supposed to work!) regardless of whether the specific evtchn you ask for
is masked or not.

The Linux PV spinlock implementation takes advantage of this because it
never wants to take a real interrupt from the spinlock poller evtchn.

The IRQ handler for the spinlock evtchn in Linux is:
        static irqreturn_t dummy_handler(int irq, void *dev_id)
        {
                BUG();
                return IRQ_HANDLED;
        }
        
and right after we register it:
                disable_irq(irq); /* make sure it's never delivered */

The is no enable -- ignoring bugs of which there have been couple of
instances, but those trigger the BUG() so are pretty obvious.

Ian.



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