Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 2/2] QEMUBH: make AioContext's bh re-entrant

[Paolo Bonzini]

Il 20/06/2013 09:39, Stefan Hajnoczi ha scritto:
> qemu_bh_cancel() and qemu_bh_delete() are not modified by this patch.
> 
> It seems that calling them from a thread is a little risky because there
> is no guarantee that the BH is no longer invoked after a thread calls
> these functions.
> 
> I think that's worth a comment or do you want them to take the lock so
> they become safe?

Taking the lock wouldn't help.  The invoking loop of aio_bh_poll runs
lockless.  I think a comment is better.

qemu_bh_cancel is inherently not thread-safe, there's not much you can
do about it.

qemu_bh_delete is safe as long as you wait for the bottom half to stop
before deleting the containing object.  Once we have RCU, deletion of
QOM objects will be RCU-protected.  Hence, a simple way could be to put
the first part of aio_bh_poll() within rcu_read_lock/unlock.

> The other thing I'm unclear on is the ->idle assignment followed
> immediately by a ->scheduled assignment.  Without memory barriers
> aio_bh_poll() isn't guaranteed to get an ordered view of these updates:
> it may see an idle BH as a regular scheduled BH because ->idle is still
> 0.

Right.  You need to order ->idle writes before ->scheduled writes, and
add memory barriers, or alternatively use two bits in ->scheduled so
that you can assign both atomically.

Paolo