On 01/04/2010 09:24 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
I'm not a huge fan of this for a couple reasons. The first is that
it introduces a subtle semantic change. Previously, timers always
ran before bottom halves whereas after this change, timers may run
after some bottoms halves but before others.
I see what you mean, and you are right: qemu_bh_new adds a
bottom half at the beginning of the queue, so it's pretty much
guaranteed that a ptimer's bottom half will run _before_ the alarm timer's.
There are three possible fixes:
1) make async.c use a tail queue. Fixes the bug, but it is too clever IMHO.
2) in tcg_exec, where there is
if (timer_alarm_pending) {
timer_alarm_pending = 0;
break;
}
instead check if any bottom half is scheduled. With this change, after
the timers run, if the ptimer's bottom half hadn't run TCG would not
execute code, qemu_bh_calculate_timeout would make main_loop_wait
nonblocking, and the ptimer's bottom half would execute right away.
BTW after my series the above check will test whether the timer bottom
half is scheduled, so in some sense this could be considered a bugfix
that would be placed _very early_ in the series or could even go in
independently.
3) Both of the above. 2 would provide the fix and 1 would provide a
performance improvement by avoiding the useless looping.
But more importantly, I think timer dispatch needs to be part of the
select loop. malc has a git tree that replaces host alarm timers
with select() timeouts. This has a lot of really nice properties
like it eliminates the need for signals and EINTR handling. A move
like this would likely make this more difficult.
Not necessarily, or at least, splitting qemu-timer.c may make it
marginally more difficult but not having a bottom half for timers.
With qemu-timer.c split you'd need something like
if (rc == 0) host_alarm_handler ();
after the select loop. I suppose you could basically revert this patch
and move timer handling into host_alarm_handler, but the code should
work independent of this patch. This patch (modulo your other
objection) just adds a level of indirection but doesn't change the
overall structure of the main loop.
Paolo
