[Xen-devel] Saving segment registers on interrupt / lost NMI

[Aravind Menon <aravind.menon@xxxxxxx>]

I was looking at the interrupt entry code in Xen, and noticed that segment
registers get saved depending on the CPU level which was interrupted.
Specifically, the ds, es, fs and gs registers are saved only if ring 1, 2 or 3
was interrupted, and not if ring 0 was interrupted.

What is the motivation for this?

It appears to me that this is responsible for sometimes causing "lost" NMI
interrupts. Basically, if an NMI occurs when a Xen activation was saving or
restoring these registers, the handler just returns without calling the NMI
watchdog. Is this because it may not be possible to restore the segments
otherwise? Can this be fixed by making the NMI handler always save all segment
registers? 

"Losing" an NMI is problematic in the following scenario which I am considering:
I want to use the NMI interrupt in conjunction with the hardware performance
counters for statistical profiling. The hardware counters are programmed to
generate an NMI at regular intervals, and the NMI handler collects PC samples
for statistical profiling. 

Unfortunately, if the NMI is "lost", the profiling comes to a halt, because the
hardware counters need to be restarted on each NMI. Thus, I need to make sure
that no NMIs are lost.

I would like to know if this problem can be solved by making sure that all
interrupt handlers and the NMI handler save all segment registers on entry, and
restore them on exit.

Thanks.

Aravind Menon

Doctoral School
EPFL, Switzerland







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