Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Skip vcpu_hotplug for VCPU 0 in smp_resume

[Brendan Cully <brendan@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, 01 April 2009 at 12:00, Kieran Mansley wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 11:31 +0100, Keir Fraser wrote:
> > On 01/04/2009 11:26, "Kieran Mansley" <kmansley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > >> Could it be as simple as this? I can't remember what happens if
> > >> unregister_xenbus_watch is called after the xenbus connection has been
> > >> reset. Should we just free the guest structures without interacting
> > >> with xenstore at the start of the resume method?
> > > 
> > > It may be possible to synchronise the watch handler with the
> > > suspend/resume/cancel cycle without removing the watch, but that starts
> > > to get complicated.
> > 
> > Could we avoid any of this logic executing if there are no net accelerators?
> 
> The watch handler will try to load an accelerator if the configuration
> changes, so even if there were no accelerators before the suspend,
> unless you can prevent the watch from firing, you could end up with one
> trying to load between the suspend and resume.
> 
> If you got rid of the feature to load the requested accelerator
> automatically when the configuration changes, then yes, that might be
> possible, but I think I'd rather leave that in and use an extra lock and
> some state to ignore the watch firing at bad times.  This would mean we
> could leave the watch in place during the suspend/resume/cancel cycle
> (refreshing on resume).  The suspend_cancel callback would still be
> necessary, but it would just be acquiring a lock and modifying some
> state rather than doing a xenbus watch operation.

I'm afraid my memory of the kernel suspend mechanics has gotten a bit
rusty over the last few months, so I may be off-base here. But I
thought that xs_suspend masked watches until xs_reusume or
xs_suspend_cancel? If that is the case, isn't that on its own enough
to protect netfront?

> It's not clear to me what the source of the long delay is, and whether
> that change would solve it: the extra lock would be contended with the
> watch handler's work queue, and so if the watch is the source of the
> delay it's possible that we'd just contend in a different way and the
> delay would still be there.  Brendan: can you explain the delay for me?

It's the round trips to xenstored to manage the watches, which always
have a chance to be very slow.

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