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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] Re: [Xen-devel] [BUG 1747]Guest could't find bootable device with memory more than 3600M
On 14/06/13 12:34, Ian Campbell wrote: On Fri, 2013-06-14 at 11:53 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 17:55 +0100, Stefano Stabellini wrote:We could have a xenstore flag somewhere that enables the old behaviour so that people can revert back to qemu-xen-traditional and make the pci hole below 4G even bigger than 448MB, but I think that keeping the old behaviour around is going to make the code more difficult to maintain.The downside of that is that things which worked with the old scheme may not work with the new one though. Early in a release cycle when we have time to discover what has broken then that might be OK, but is post rc4 really the time to be risking it?Yes, you are right: there are some scenarios that would have worked before that wouldn't work anymore with the new scheme. Are they important enough to have a workaround, pretty difficult to identify for a user?That question would be reasonable early in the development cycle. At rc4 the question should be: do we think this problem is so critical that we want to risk breaking something else which currently works for people. Remember that we are invalidating whatever passthrough testing people have already done up to this point of the release. It is also worth noting that the things which this change ends up breaking may for all we know be equally difficult for a user to identify (they are after all approximately the same class of issue). The problem here is that the risk is difficult to evaluate, we just don't know what will break with this change, and we don't know therefore if the cure is worse than the disease. The conservative approach at this point in the release would be to not change anything, or to change the minimal possible number of things (which would preclude changes which impact qemu-trad IMHO).WRT pretty difficult to identify -- the root of this thread suggests the guest entered a reboot loop with "No bootable device", that sounds eminently release notable to me. I also not that it was changing the size of the PCI hole which caused the issue -- which does somewhat underscore the risks involved in this sort of change.But that bug was a bug in the first attempt to fix the root problem. The root problem shows up as qemu crashing at some point because it tried to access invalid guest gpfn space; see http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2013-03/msg00559.html. Stefano tried to fix it with the above patch, just changing the hole to start at 0xe; but that was incomplete, as it didn't match with hvmloader and seabios's view of the world. That's what this bug report is about. This thread is an attempt to find a better fix. So the root problem is that if we revert this patch, and someone passes through a pci device using qemu-xen (the default) and the MMIO hole is resized, at some point in the future qemu will randomly die.Right, I see, thanks for explaining.If it's a choice between users experiencing, "My VM randomly crashes" and experiencing, "I tried to pass through this device but the guest OS doesn't see it", I'd rather choose the latter.All other things being equal, obviously we all would. But the point I've been trying to make is that we don't know the other consequences of making that fix -- e.g. on existing working configurations. So the choice is "some VMs randomly crash, but other stuff works fine and we have had a reasonable amount of user testing" and "those particular VMs don't crash any more, but we don't know what other stuff no longer works and the existing test base has been at least partially invalidated". I think that at post rc4 in a release we ought to be being pretty conservative about the risks of this sort of change, especially wrt invalidating testing and the unknowns involved. Aren't the configurations which might trip over this issue are going to be in the minority compared to those which we risk breaking? So there are the technical proposals we've been discussing, each of which has different risks. 1. Set the default MMIO hole size to 0xe0000000.2. If possible, relocate PCI devices that don't fit in the hole to the 64-bit hole. - Here "if possible" will mean a) the device has a 64-bit BAR, and b) this hasn't been disabled by libxl (probably via a xenstore key). 3. If possible, resize the MMIO hole; otherwise refuse to map the device- Currently "if possible" is always true; the new thing here would be making it possible for libxl to disable this, probably via a xenstore key. Each of these will have different risks for qemu-traditional and qemu-xen.Implementing #3 would have no risk for qemu-traditional, because we won't be changing the way anything works; what works will still work, what is broken (if anything) will still be broken. Implementing #3 for qemu-xen only changes one kind of failure for another. If you resize the MMIO hole for qemu-xen, then you *will* eventually crash. So this will not break existing working configurations -- it will only change the failure from "qemu crashes at some point" to "the guest OS cannot see the device". This is a uniform improvement. So #3 is very low risk, as far as I can tell, and has a solid benefit. I think we should definitely implement it. I think #2 should have no impact on qemu-traditional, because xl should disable it by default. For qemu-xen, the only devices that are relocated are devices that would otherwise be disabled by #3; so remember that the alternate for this one (assuming we implement #3) is "not visible to OS". There are several potential sub-sets here: a. Guest OSes that can't access the 64-bit region. In that case the device will not be visible, which is the same failure as not implementing this at all. b. I think most devices and operating systems will just work; this codepath in QEMU and guest OSes is fairly well tested with KVM. c. It may be that there are devices that would have worked with qemu-traditional and placed in a resized MMIO hole, but that will break with qemu-xen and and placed in the 64-bit MMIO hole. For these devices, the failure mode will change from "not visible to guest OS" to "fails in some other unforseen way". The the main risk I see from this one is c. However, I think from a cost-benefits, it's still pretty low -- we get the benefit of most people transparently being able to just use pci-passthrough, at the potential cost of a handful of people having "weird crash" failures instead of "can't use the device" failures. I suppose that there is a potential risk for b as well, in that we haven't tested relocating to the 64-bit MMIO hole *with Xen*. There may be assumptions about 32-bit paddrs baked in somewhere that we don't know about. If we implement this change on top of #3, and there are problems with b, then it will change "device not visible to guest OS" failures back into "may crash in a weird way" failures. On the whole I would be inclined to implement #2 if it's not too difficult, but I can certainly see the point of saying that it's too risky and that we shouldn't do it. Then there's #1. This should in theory be low-risk, because in theory hvmloader might have chosen 0xe as the start of the MMIO hole anyway. For qemu-traditional, this change has no benefits. The benefits for qemu-xen depend on what else gets implemented. If nothing else is implemented, this changes some "random qemu crash" failures into successes (while leaving other ones to keep crashing). If #3 is implemented, then it changes some "guest OS can't see device" failures into successes. If Both #3 and #2 are implemented, then some of the "guest OS can't see 64-bit MMIO hole" failures will change into successes. However, as you say, the number of times hvmloader *actually* choses that at the moment is fairly low. The vast majority of VMs and configurations at the moment will *not* use 0xe as a base; at most only a handful of people will have tested that configuration. So there is a fairly significant risk that there *is* some configuration for which, *had* hvmloader chosen 0xe, then it *would* have caused a problem. For those configurations, #1 will change "will break but only if you have a very large PCI device" to "will break no matter what". This would be fine if we hadn't started RCs; but we have. Our most important userbase is people who are *not* doing pci pass-through; so I think I agree with you, that this introduces a probably unacceptable risk for very little gain -- particularly if we implement #3. So my recommendation is: * Implement #3 * Consider implementing #2 * Don't implement #1. Thoughts? -George _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel
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