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Re: [Xen-devel] Requesting for freeze exception for ARM/ITS patches



Hi Ian,

On 10/07/2015 18:07, Ian Campbell wrote:
On Fri, 2015-07-10 at 16:16 +0530, Vijay Kilari wrote:
     I would like to have freeze exception for ITS feature on ARM64.
Design got freeze few weeks back and I have sent v4 version of patch series
today.

Thanks, I've been through v4 and it is certainly much improved over v3.

I haven't had time to look closer to the code. I will do Wednesday when I'm back.

Although I skimmed quickly the series and it looks ok.

There are some smaller issues and one slightly more major one regarding
the mechanisms used to inject a vlpi, which I hope I've explained fully
enough in the review (in short if you do what the design draft says it
should be fixed, the incorrectness and complexity is all down to trying
to do things a different way which leads to you needing to lookup things
which you shouldn't need to lookup in places where you don't need them)

This patches will not impact any generic code of other platforms and have minor
changes generic arm related code. Also these patches are only for
ARM64 platform.

There is some stuff which touches the non-ITS related ARM interrupt
handling, however they are mostly adding checks in is_lpi and in some
cases alternative code if it is true, which should be pretty safe.

I will comment on this later in the patch series. But some usage of is_lpi are worrying for the IRQ passthrough in general.

Some instance are route_irq_to_guest. The function is re-used in different way for LPIs. Which make the code more difficult to read and potentially buggy.

I suggested an idea in v3 (http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2015-06/msg03756.html) but it seems that it has not been taking into account in v4.

As I mentioned during review care needs to be taken to ensure that this
code is not enabled for any guest on a platform which has no ITS and to
only enable it for dom0 on platforms which do.

Due to the structure of the patch series (which is not optimised for
being able to follow what is going on) it wasn't clear to me if this was
the case, but I think not. There are no checks for dom0 and only checks
for the presence of LPI/ITS in the physical gic, not as a property of
the individual domains.

When I say "not enabled" I mean no MMIO handlers registered, no
GITS_TRANSLATER MMIO mapping to the guest, no functional change to the
existing GIC* registers.

These patches are pre-requisite for PCI support / Pass-through support
on ARM64 platforms.

As I explained in my reply to Jan I think this is underselling it a
little, since AIUI it should make it possible to boot Xen on ThunderX
and do useful things (like run guests).

Well, PCI are able to support both legacy interrupt and MSI. If there is no MSI, the PCI will use the former. The performance may be "poor" but it will at least boot Xen on ThunderX and creating guest.

Furthermore, I think this is important to note that this feature is more a tech preview than a production ready one.

The current implementation is working fine with the current version of Linux, it behave as we expect. But the emulation as some TODO (I have in mind GICR_PROPBASER) which need to be fixed in order to support any Linux.

We had a similar bug in GICv3 for the re-distributor emulation which took us a month to fix it.

I'm not saying that I'm against a freeze exception, but we need some promise from Cavium to finish/cleanup the implementation afterwards.

I have in mind some code placement which may be ok for Xen 4.6 (ITS in domain_build vITS initialization directly called in the setup.c...) but it's definitely against the principle that we are trying to keep the common code as common as possible.

Regards,

--
Julien Grall

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