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Re: [Xen-users] substantial shutdown delay for PV guests with PCI -passthrough



Ian, as always - thanks for your reply.
Am 17.03.14 11:00, schrieb Ian Campbell:
On Sun, 2014-03-16 at 15:41 +0100, Atom2 wrote:
Hi list,
I am experiencing a substantial delay if I shutdown a PV linux guest
which has PCI devices passed-through:

I start the domain using
        xl create -c domain

Then I login from the connected console and do a
        shutdown -h now
which results in normal shutdown messages (w/o errors) showing on the
console screen. The last line of messages then reads:
        [   36.535466] reboot: System halted

So all seems normal and as expected; the strange thing, however, is that
the prompt in dom0 only returns after a substantial amount of time which
appears to be _proportional_ to the number of PCI devices passed
through: For every device specified in the
        pci = [ bb:dd.f, ... ]
entry in the guest configuration file the delay is 10 seconds. In other
words for 4 PCI devices passed through, it takes 40 seconds before the
prompt in dom0 returns (though I did not make any test with more than 4
devices).

If I issue the command
        xl list
from an other terminal connected to dom0 while the delay is on-going it
shows that the domain in question remains in the state 's', which
according to the man page indicates that "the guest OS has shut down
(SCHEDOP_shutdown has been called) but the domain is not dying yet".
This state does not change until the prompt in dom0 returns (at least
repeated 'xl list' commands show the same output) and then the line for
the domain is gone.

If no devices are passed through, the prompt in dom0 after having shut
down the domU appears without any noticeable delay.

All tests have been performed using the same environment while only
changing the relevant line in the domU configuration file.

The xen version used is 4.3.1-r5, xen-tools is also 4.3.1-r5 and the
kernel used for both dom0 and domUs is 3.11.7 (hardende gentoo sources).

Any chance you could try 4.3.2, or even 4.4.0?
Unfortunately neither of these versions are currently available as stable ebuilds for my distribution, but I assume it shouldn't be long before there's some movement.

The system is capable of vt-d and uses a Xeon E3-1260L processor.

Do these observations ring a bell with anybody or is this even expected
behaviour. If this is not normal - which I would expect as I have not
been able to find any information relating to substantial delays during
shutdown - how would I go about getting to the grounds of this?

My guess would be that xl process which is managing the domain destroy
is waiting for something (perhaps pciback) to confirm shutdown for each
device and this is timing out in series, leading to the delays. You
might find something in the logs /var/log/xen pointing to something like
this.

If not then if you start the guest with "xl -vvv create -F <cfg>" then
the xl process which is monitoring the domain will stay in the
foreground and be logging to stdout (I think). If you then issue the
shutdown from another shell perhaps there will be some obvious gaps in
the logs as things shutdown which might help.
That worked and there also was some output - please find the log from start to finnish attached to this mail. I have marked various points in the log: First the point where the startup was done and the domU was live and secondly those 4 points in time (or rather output) where the 10s delay occured.

BTW: I don't know whether it makes any difference, but I am only using xen-pciback.hide=(bb:dd.f)(...) on the grub command line for a number of devices including those that I pass through to this domU - there's nothing else happening in the dom0 with those devices priot to starting the domU and there are also no driver modules available for any of the hidden hardware (except for one of the hidden USB Controllers of the motherboard which is also passed through) in dom0.

Ian.

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