[Xen-ia64-devel] [PATCH] Fix severe vtlb BUG which made domU crash randomly

["Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx>]

When I was debugging domU, machine crash often occurred when domU is
detecting IDE disk (need disable later with different config file for
xen0/xenU) which preventing further progress. After some investigation,
the root cause is that page fault handler invokes vcpu_itc_no_srlz with
5th param (guest pte) to be (-1UL). However there's no detection upon
such deliberate value in vcpu_itc_no_srlz, which thus updates (-1UL)
into copy of guest pte (vcpu->arch.dtlb_pte). 

However match_dtlb only checks machine pte (vcpu->arch.dtlb) which is
still valid. Once this entry is hit in next page fault handler, (-1UL)
will be returned as the guest pte value and later translation for
machine pfn failed.

I think this can explain why Dan saw dom0 unstable after my previous
vtlb fix. Then after Dan pushed out a temporary solution for dom0, the
issue was left only to domU. I'm not sure why the phenomenon related to
this reason didn't occur to me previously, but big merges in the middle
may be the cause. John, maybe you can make a try since you saw domU
crash for a long time (But has to be upon your previous Rev). ;-)

A side effect of this change is that vtlb can be hit more frequently
than before. I didn't remove the print line after match_dtlb, and you
can see it occurring more. The possible reason is that guest svhpt entry
will live longer now.

(BTW, this fix doesn't bring domU up, and blkfront still failed to
connect. But it can provide a pretty stable/reproducible env now.)

Thanks,
Kevin

Attachment: hg_0915_fix_vtlb
Description: hg_0915_fix_vtlb

_______________________________________________
Xen-ia64-devel mailing list
Xen-ia64-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-ia64-devel