Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC v3 0/56] per-CPU locks

[Emilio G. Cota]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 15:29:32 -0400, Emilio G. Cota wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 18:01:18 +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > > Given that we need a per-CPU lock anyway to remove the BQL from the
> > > CPU loop, extending this lock to protect cpu->interrupt_request is
> > > a simple solution that keeps the current logic and allows for
> > > greater scalability.
> > 
> > Sure, I was just curious what the problem was.  KVM uses OR+kick with no
> > problems.
> 
> I never found exactly where things break. The hangs happen
> pretty early when booting a large (-smp > 16) x86_64 Ubuntu guest.
> Booting never completes (ssh unresponsive) if I don't have the
> console output (I suspect the console output slows things down
> enough to hide some races). I only see a few threads busy:
> a couple of vCPU threads, and the I/O thread.
> 
> I didn't have time to debug any further, so I moved on
> to an alternative approach.
> 
> So it is possible that it was my implementation, and not the approach,
> what was at fault :-)

I've just observed a similar hang after adding the "BQL
pushdown" patches on top of this series. So it's likely that the
hangs come from those patches, and not from the work on
cpu->interrupt_request. I just confirmed with the prior
series, and removing the pushdown patches fixes the hangs there
as well.

Thanks,

                Emilio