Re: [Xen-devel] Xen HPET improvement proposal

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 25.10.13 at 15:11, Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 25/10/13 13:47, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>
>>> Independently of the HPET issues themselves, I have identified a race
>>> condition in the mwait-idle routines where a cpu which is preparing to
>>> sleep can arrange for another cpu to wake it up, and have that other cpu
>>> wake it up before it has enabled its mwait trigger, meaning that it will
>>> idle for an arbitrary length of time in mwait.  Realistically, the cpu
>>> will be woken up by the time calibration rendezvous once a second, and
>>> possibly by the watchdog NMI every half second.
>> Which is an awfully long period of time... Looking forward to see
>> further details on this.
> 
> The fix is fairly simple.  The mwait code must set up the trigger on its
> mwait region before arranging to be woken up.  That way, if the other
> cpu does wake up (early perhaps), it will activate the trigger, and we
> will bounce straight back out of mwait rather than sleeping indefinitely.

Actually I think rather than setting the trigger earlier (i.e. moving
the invocation of __monitor() out of mwait_idle_with_hints()) we
should rather check for an already occurred wakeup right after
having invoked __monitor(). Since the boolean-ness of the variable
pointed to by mwait_wakeup() is currently unused, we could easily
use that one. Patch in the works...

Jan

Jan


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel