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[Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/3] Determinitic behaviour with icount.


From: fred . konrad
Subject: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/3] Determinitic behaviour with icount.
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 17:02:34 +0200

From: KONRAD Frederic <address@hidden>

Hi everybody,

As I said in the last email, we have issues with determinism with icount.
We are wondering if determinism is really ensured with icount?

We saw that the rt_clock is used at multiple place which is a pain for
replaying the simulation the same way. So we simply base rt_clock on icount.

When the cpu is idle vm_clock is synchronized with the host clock which is bad
for determinism, and this happen regularly in time even if there are no I/O.
We choose to synchronize vm_clock on the next event to make sure the vm will
restart, and to avoid non determinism.

Is this the right think to do?

An other issue:

A timer callback is triggered to make the snapshot regularly. Unfortunately this
was not at all regular. For example: if we use step function in GDB instead of
cont, the callback will be triggered more often.

So we :
    * created a new clock (ic_clock) based only on icount without the bias.
    * and we repaired icount_extra mechanism by computing it from ic_clock.

Then the snapshot are taken regularly with or without stepping in gdb, the timer
became accurate and call the callback at the exact ic_clock time.

Both icount and reverse execution need an instruction counter. icount use a
count-down mechanism but reverse execution need a continuous counter. For now
we have build a separate counter and we think that these two counters can be
merged. However we would like feedback about this before modifying this.

Adding these features has moved us forward, but - QEMU is STILL not
deterministic - we believe this is likely due to I/O which we will start
investigating next.

Fred

KONRAD Frederic (3):
  icount: base rt_clock on icount.
  icount: sync vm_clock on the next event.
  icount: create a new icount based timer.

 cpus.c               | 21 +++++++++++++++++----
 include/qemu/timer.h |  4 ++++
 main-loop.c          |  5 +++++
 qemu-timer.c         | 12 +++++++++++-
 4 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

-- 
1.8.1.4




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