10 Sep, 2009

4 commits

  • This code is not executed before file has been initialized to the result of
    calling eventfd_fget. This function returns an ERR_PTR value in an error
    case instead of NULL. Thus the test that file is not NULL is always true.

    A simplified version of the semantic match that finds this problem is as
    follows: (http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/)

    //
    @match exists@
    expression x, E;
    statement S1, S2;
    @@

    x = eventfd_fget(...)
    ... when != x = E
    (
    * if (x == NULL || ...) S1 else S2
    |
    * if (x == NULL && ...) S1 else S2
    )
    //

    Signed-off-by: Julia Lawall
    Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity

    Julia Lawall
     
  • ioeventfd is a mechanism to register PIO/MMIO regions to trigger an eventfd
    signal when written to by a guest. Host userspace can register any
    arbitrary IO address with a corresponding eventfd and then pass the eventfd
    to a specific end-point of interest for handling.

    Normal IO requires a blocking round-trip since the operation may cause
    side-effects in the emulated model or may return data to the caller.
    Therefore, an IO in KVM traps from the guest to the host, causes a VMX/SVM
    "heavy-weight" exit back to userspace, and is ultimately serviced by qemu's
    device model synchronously before returning control back to the vcpu.

    However, there is a subclass of IO which acts purely as a trigger for
    other IO (such as to kick off an out-of-band DMA request, etc). For these
    patterns, the synchronous call is particularly expensive since we really
    only want to simply get our notification transmitted asychronously and
    return as quickly as possible. All the sychronous infrastructure to ensure
    proper data-dependencies are met in the normal IO case are just unecessary
    overhead for signalling. This adds additional computational load on the
    system, as well as latency to the signalling path.

    Therefore, we provide a mechanism for registration of an in-kernel trigger
    point that allows the VCPU to only require a very brief, lightweight
    exit just long enough to signal an eventfd. This also means that any
    clients compatible with the eventfd interface (which includes userspace
    and kernelspace equally well) can now register to be notified. The end
    result should be a more flexible and higher performance notification API
    for the backend KVM hypervisor and perhipheral components.

    To test this theory, we built a test-harness called "doorbell". This
    module has a function called "doorbell_ring()" which simply increments a
    counter for each time the doorbell is signaled. It supports signalling
    from either an eventfd, or an ioctl().

    We then wired up two paths to the doorbell: One via QEMU via a registered
    io region and through the doorbell ioctl(). The other is direct via
    ioeventfd.

    You can download this test harness here:

    ftp://ftp.novell.com/dev/ghaskins/doorbell.tar.bz2

    The measured results are as follows:

    qemu-mmio: 110000 iops, 9.09us rtt
    ioeventfd-mmio: 200100 iops, 5.00us rtt
    ioeventfd-pio: 367300 iops, 2.72us rtt

    I didn't measure qemu-pio, because I have to figure out how to register a
    PIO region with qemu's device model, and I got lazy. However, for now we
    can extrapolate based on the data from the NULLIO runs of +2.56us for MMIO,
    and -350ns for HC, we get:

    qemu-pio: 153139 iops, 6.53us rtt
    ioeventfd-hc: 412585 iops, 2.37us rtt

    these are just for fun, for now, until I can gather more data.

    Here is a graph for your convenience:

    http://developer.novell.com/wiki/images/7/76/Iofd-chart.png

    The conclusion to draw is that we save about 4us by skipping the userspace
    hop.

    --------------------

    Signed-off-by: Gregory Haskins
    Acked-by: Michael S. Tsirkin
    Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity

    Gregory Haskins
     
  • Protect irq injection/acking data structures with a separate irq_lock
    mutex. This fixes the following deadlock:

    CPU A CPU B
    kvm_vm_ioctl_deassign_dev_irq()
    mutex_lock(&kvm->lock); worker_thread()
    -> kvm_deassign_irq() -> kvm_assigned_dev_interrupt_work_handler()
    -> deassign_host_irq() mutex_lock(&kvm->lock);
    -> cancel_work_sync() [blocked]

    [gleb: fix ia64 path]

    Reported-by: Alex Williamson
    Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti
    Signed-off-by: Gleb Natapov
    Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity

    Marcelo Tosatti
     
  • KVM provides a complete virtual system environment for guests, including
    support for injecting interrupts modeled after the real exception/interrupt
    facilities present on the native platform (such as the IDT on x86).
    Virtual interrupts can come from a variety of sources (emulated devices,
    pass-through devices, etc) but all must be injected to the guest via
    the KVM infrastructure. This patch adds a new mechanism to inject a specific
    interrupt to a guest using a decoupled eventfd mechnanism: Any legal signal
    on the irqfd (using eventfd semantics from either userspace or kernel) will
    translate into an injected interrupt in the guest at the next available
    interrupt window.

    Signed-off-by: Gregory Haskins
    Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity

    Gregory Haskins