Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> Hello,
>
> [ I already sent it once as [EMAIL PROTECTED] but it didn't go through
> for whatever reason, trying again from private email, hope there
> won't be dups ]
>
oh, it was sent to the list, dont trust (in case you did) the source
forge site for the mails
inside this list, gmane is much better...
> My worst longstanding problem with KVM is that as the uptime of my
> host system increased, my opensuse guest images started to destabilize
> and lockup at boot. The weird thing was that fresh after boot
> everything was always perfectly ok, so I thought it was rmmod/insmod
> or some other sticky effect on the CPU after restarting the guest a
> few times that triggered the crash. Furthermore if I loaded the cpu a
> lot (like with a while :; do true;done), the crash would magically
> disappear. Decreasing cpu frequency and timings didn't help. Debugging
> wasn't trivial because it required a certain uptime and it didn't
> always crash.
>
> So I once debugged this more aggressively I figured out KVM was ok, it
> was the guest that crashed in the tsc clocksource because tsc wasn't
> monotone. guest was looping in an infinite loop with irq disabled. So
> I tried to pass "notsc" and that fixed the crash just fine.
>
> Initially I thought it was the tsc_offset logic being wrong but then I
> figured out that the vcpu_put/load wasn't always executed, this
> bugcheck triggers with current git and so I recommend to apply this to
> kvm.git to avoid similar nasty hard-to-detect bugs in the future (Avi
> says vmx would crash hard in such a condition, svm is much simpler and
> it somewhat survives the lack of sched_in and only crashes the guest
> due to not monotone tsc):
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c b/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
> index ac876ec..26372fa 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
> @@ -742,6 +742,7 @@ void kvm_arch_vcpu_load(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, int cpu)
>
> void kvm_arch_vcpu_put(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu)
> {
> + WARN_ON(vcpu->cpu != smp_processor_id());
> kvm_x86_ops->vcpu_put(vcpu);
> kvm_put_guest_fpu(vcpu);
> }
>
>
>
> So trying to understand why the ->cpu was wrong, I looked into the
> preempt notifiers emulation, and it looked quite fragile without a
> real sched_in hook. I figured out I could provide a real sched_in hook
> by loading the proper values in the
> tsk->thread.debugreg[0/7]. Initially I got the hooking points out of
> objdump -d vmlinux, but Avi preferred no dependency on the vmlinux and
> he suggested to try to find the sched_in hook in the stack. So that's
> what I implemented now and this should provide real robustness to the
> out of tree module compiled against binary kernel images with
> CONFIG_KVM=n. I tried to be compatible with all kernels down to 2.6.5
> but only 2.6.2x host is tested and only on 64bit and only on SVM (no
> vmx system around here at all).
>
> This fixes my longstanding KVM instability and "-smp 2" now works
> flawlessy with svm too! -smp 2 -snapshot crashes in qemu userland but
> that's not kernel related, must be some thread mutex lock recursion or
> lock inversion in the qcow cow code. Removing -snapshot make -smp 2
> stable. Multiple guests UP and SMP seems stable too.
>
you mean that without -snapshot, the userspace not hang at the sigwait()
in the qcow code?
> To reproduce my crash easily without waiting ages for the two tsc to
> deviate with an error larger than the number of cycles it takes for a
> CPU migration, run write_tsc(0,0) in kernel mode (like in the svm.c
> init function and then insmod kvm-amd; rmmod kvm-amd and then remove
> write_tsc and recompile kvm-amd).
>
>
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