Re: [Xen-devel] new netfront and occasional receive path lockup

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

 On 08/22/2010 11:37 AM, Christophe Saout wrote:
> Hmm, looking a bit more.
>
> rx.sring->private.netif.smartpoll_active lies in a piece of memory that
> is shared between netback and netfront, is that right?
>
> If that is so, the tx spinlock in netfront only protects against
> simultaneous modifications from another thread in netfront, so netback
> can read smartpoll_active while netfront is fiddling with it.  Is that
> safe?

It depends on exactly how it is used.  But any use cross-cpu shared
memory must carefully consider access ordering, and possibly have
explicit barriers to make sure that the expected ordering is actually
seen by all cpus.

    J

> Note that when the lockup occurs, /proc/interrupts in the guest doesn't
> show any interrupts arriving from for eth0 anymore.  Are there any
> conditions where netback waits for netfront to retrieve packages even
> when new packages arrive? (like e.g. when the ring is full and there is
> backlog into the network stack or something?) Any way to debug this from
> the Dom0 side?  Like looking into the state of the ring from userspace?
> Debug options?
>
>       Christophe
>
>
>
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