On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 09:45:32AM +0800, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 08:49:13PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote: > > cur_mon was only used in main loop so we don't really need that to be > > per-thread variable. Now it's possible that we have more than one > > thread to operate on it. Let's start to let it be per-thread variable. > > Trying to understand the reason for this patch: > > Are there any users of per-thread cur_mon?
Currently no. But if considering future OOB-capable commands, they will modify cur_mon in monitor IOThread at least. > > or > > Does this patch fix a bug? No; currently we have no bug. But we have encounter the bug when we start to add more OOB commands. Here is the problem (Marc-Andre reported this, and I'll try to summarize): after we have valid OOB commands, monitor_qmp_dispatch_one() can be run not only in main thread, but also in monitor iothread. When that happens, both of them (main thread, and monitor iothread) can be modifying the cur_mon variable at the same time. [1] Considering that cur_mon is only used "just like" a stack variable, it should be perfectly fine we just make it as a per thread variable, hence this patch. > > > In case we'll create threads within a valid cur_mon setup, we'd better > > let the child threads to inherit the cur_mon from parent thread too. Do > > that for both posix and win32 threads. > > Without actual users I don't like this. It sounds like "let's make it > global just in case something needs it some day". > > It's ugly for QEMU's thread API to know about the monitor - that's a > layering violation. Yes, I'm sorry about it. Actually I don't like it too. But that seems to be an efficient and simple solution to me now. The ideal solution should be totally removing cur_mon, which is non-trivial. And for sure we can try to avoid layer violation. For example, we can have something like qemu_thread_register_variable(pthread_key_t), then monitor code can register the cur_mon pthread_key to the qemu thread module. That'll somehow achieve isolation between modules but I'm not sure whether that would be necessary for now, hence I chose the simple. > > If there's a legitimate need I think this patch might be necessary, but > I don't see enough justification to do this yet. The problem was described at [1]. Thanks, -- Peter Xu