Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 10/21] aspeed/timer: Provide back-pressure information for short periods

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 18 Jun 2019 at 17:54, Cédric Le Goater <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> From: Andrew Jeffery <address@hidden>
>
> First up: This is not the way the hardware behaves.
>
> However, it helps resolve real-world problems with short periods being
> used under Linux. Commit 4451d3f59f2a ("clocksource/drivers/fttmr010:
> Fix set_next_event handler") in Linux fixed the timer driver to
> correctly schedule the next event for the Aspeed controller, and in
> combination with 5daa8212c08e ("ARM: dts: aspeed: Describe random number
> device") Linux will now set a timer with a period as low as 1us.
>
> Configuring a qemu timer with such a short period results in spending
> time handling the interrupt in the model rather than executing guest
> code, leading to noticeable "sticky" behaviour in the guest.
>
> The behaviour of Linux is correct with respect to the hardware, so we
> need to improve our handling under emulation. The approach chosen is to
> provide back-pressure information by calculating an acceptable minimum
> number of ticks to be set on the model. Under Linux an additional read
> is added in the timer configuration path to detect back-pressure, which
> will never occur on hardware. However if back-pressure is observed, the
> driver alerts the clock event subsystem, which then performs its own
> next event dilation via a config option - d1748302f70b ("clockevents:
> Make minimum delay adjustments configurable")
>
> A minimum period of 5us was experimentally determined on a Lenovo
> T480s, which I've increased to 20us for "safety".
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrew Jeffery <address@hidden>
> Signed-off-by: Cédric Le Goater <address@hidden>

> --- a/hw/misc/aspeed_scu.c
> +++ b/hw/misc/aspeed_scu.c
> @@ -423,6 +423,12 @@ static void aspeed_scu_realize(DeviceState *dev, Error 
> **errp)
>                            TYPE_ASPEED_SCU, SCU_IO_REGION_SIZE);
>
>      sysbus_init_mmio(sbd, &s->iomem);
> +
> +    /*
> +     * Reset on realize to ensure the APB clock value is calculated in time 
> for
> +     * use by the timer model, which is reset before the SCU.
> +     */
> +    aspeed_scu_reset(dev);

This looks wrong. QEMU should always be resetting devices
after realize and before actually running anything.

>  }

thanks
-- PMM