On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 18:24:55 -0700, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 23/08/2015 17:24, Emilio G. Cota wrote:
> > This is similar in intent to the async_safe_work mechanism. The main
> > differences are:
> >
> > - Work is run on a single CPU thread *after* all others are put to sleep
> >
> > - Sleeping threads are woken up by the worker thread upon completing its job
> >
> > - A flag as been added to tcg_ctx so that only one thread can schedule
> > work at a time. The flag is checked every time tb_lock is acquired.
> >
> > - Handles the possibility of CPU threads being created after the existing
> > CPUs are put to sleep. This is easily triggered with many threads on
> > a many-core host in usermode.
> >
> > - Works for both softmmu and usermode
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Emilio G. Cota <c...@braap.org>
>
> I think this is a duplicate of the existing run_on_cpu code. If needed
> in user-mode emulation, it should be extracted out of cpus.c.
They're similar, yes.
> Also I think it is dangerous (prone to deadlocks) to wait for other CPUs
> with synchronize_cpu and condvar.
The key to avoid deadlocks is not to hold any locks that might be
acquired within an RCU read critical section when calling
synchronize_rcu(). The condvars are for the sleeping threads so
that they can be woken up; sleepers don't call synchronize_rcu().
> I would much rather prefer to _halt_
> the CPUs if there is pending work, and keep it halted like this:
>
> static inline bool cpu_has_work(CPUState *cpu)
> {
> CPUClass *cc = CPU_GET_CLASS(cpu);
>
> + if (tcg_ctx.tb_ctx.tcg_has_work) {
> + return false;
> + }
> g_assert(cc->has_work);
> return cc->has_work(cpu);
> }
>
> You can then run flush_queued_work from linux-user/main.c (and
> bsd-user/main.c) when cpu_exec returns EXCP_HALTED.
OK. Will try something like this.
Emilio
