Re: [Xen-devel] Xen Guest Timer (ARM) question

[embeddev student <embed.dev.student@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 7:56 PM, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2014-08-31 at 15:01 +0530, embeddev student wrote:
>
> > Q1. Why is guest not given only a virtual timer, What is the need for
> > the guest to have a physical timer as well ?
>
> Some guest kernels may not know about the virt timer yet, since it is
> new, or they may choose not to use it for some reason (not so likely
> since we require paravirt of the timers under Xen today, but eventually
> we may want to think about running unmodified OSes on ARM).
>
> It can also occasionally be useful for Paravirtualisation to know both
> the real and virtual time (although I can't think of an example off
> hand...)
>
> > Q2. In virt_timer_save set_timer is called. If vcpu is going in a
> > suspended state what is the requirement of a timer being set ?
>
> This is setting a Xen software timer, not a hardware timer (except that
> setting  software timer may trigger the hypervisor timer to be used to
> fulfil it).
>
> Since we are descheduling the vcpu we save its virt+phys timer state,
> including the comparators, so we can use the hardware for the next vcpu.
> The timer is there to make sure we wake up the vcpu when its timer would
> have expired and triggered an interrupt.
>
Wouldnt there be a problem in this? If two guests timers are
configured to expire at the same physical time, how would Xen knows it
needs to inject the interrupt into which Guest. It always injects
virtual timer interrupt into current which many be G3.

From a pure academic point of view, and using ARM virtual timers in
VMs, below is my take on ARM Timer Virtualization
(a) Guest would be using a HW Virtual Timer Interrupt  and Hypervisor
should use HW Hypervisor Timer Interrupt.
(b) Paravirt Timers may not be required as ARM has provided the same
feature to minimize the context switches to read the TimerCounter
(c) If a guest is running only then the virtual time be incremented.
So if two vcpus are there and there is only 1 physical core
(hypothetically) then the guest time be incremented as long as any
vcpu is running for that guest.



>
> Ian.

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