Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/5] Slow-path for atomic instruction translation

[Mark Burton]

By the way - would it help to send the atomic patch we did separately from the 
whole MTTCG patch set?
Or have you already taken a look at that - it’s pretty short.

Cheers

Mark.


> On 6 May 2015, at 17:51, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 06/05/2015 17:38, Alvise Rigo wrote:
>> This patch series provides an infrastructure for atomic
>> instruction implementation in QEMU, paving the way for TCG multi-threading.
>> The adopted design does not rely on host atomic
>> instructions and is intended to propose a 'legacy' solution for
>> translating guest atomic instructions.
>> 
>> The underlying idea is to provide new TCG instructions that guarantee
>> atomicity to some memory accesses or in general a way to define memory
>> transactions. More specifically, a new pair of TCG instructions are
>> implemented, qemu_ldlink_i32 and qemu_stcond_i32, that behave as
>> LoadLink and StoreConditional primitives (only 32 bit variant
>> implemented).  In order to achieve this, a new bitmap is added to the
>> ram_list structure (always unique) which flags all memory pages that
>> could not be accessed directly through the fast-path, due to previous
>> exclusive operations. This new bitmap is coupled with a new TLB flag
>> which forces the slow-path exectuion. All stores which take place
>> between an LL/SC operation by other vCPUs in the same memory page, will
>> fail the subsequent StoreConditional.
>> 
>> In theory, the provided implementation of TCG LoadLink/StoreConditional
>> can be used to properly handle atomic instructions on any architecture.
>> 
>> The new slow-path is implemented such that:
>> - the LoadLink behaves as a normal load slow-path, except for cleaning
>>  the dirty flag in the bitmap. The TLB entries created from now on will
>>  force the slow-path. To ensure it, we flush the TLB cache for the
>>  other vCPUs
>> - the StoreConditional behaves as a normal store slow-path, except for
>>  checking the state of the dirty bitmap and returning 0 or 1 whether or
>>  not the StoreConditional succeeded (0 when no vCPU has touched the
>>  same memory in the mean time).
>> 
>> All those write accesses that are forced to follow the 'legacy'
>> slow-path will set the accessed memory page to dirty.
>> 
>> In this series only the ARM ldrex/strex instructions are implemented.
>> The code was tested with bare-metal test cases and with Linux, using
>> upstream QEMU.
>> 
>> This work has been sponsored by Huawei Technologies Dusseldorf GmbH.
>> 
>> Alvise Rigo (5):
>>  exec: Add new exclusive bitmap to ram_list
>>  Add new TLB_EXCL flag
>>  softmmu: Add helpers for a new slow-path
>>  tcg-op: create new TCG qemu_ldlink and qemu_stcond instructions
>>  target-arm: translate: implement qemu_ldlink and qemu_stcond ops
> 
> That's pretty cool.
> 
> Paolo


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        mark.burton