Comment 12 for bug 791850

On 08.08.2011 21:38, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 02:59:05PM +0200, Stefan Bader wrote:
>> Since kernel 2.6.39 we were experiencing strange hangs when booting those as HVM
>> guests in Xen (similar hangs but different places when looking at CentOS 5.4 +
>> Xen 3.4.3 as well as Xen 4.1 and a 3.0 based dom0). The problem only happens
>> when running with more than one vcpu.
>>
>
> Hey Stefan,
>
> We were all at the XenSummit and I think did not get to think about this at all.
> Also the merge window openned so that ate a good chunk of time. Anyhow..
>

Ah, right. Know the feeling. :) I am travelling this week, too.

> Is this related to this: http://marc.info/?<email address hidden> ?
>

On a quick glance it seems to be different. What I was looking at was dom0
setups which worked for HVM guests up to kernel 2.6.38. And locked up at some
point when a guest kernel after that was started in SMP mode.

>> I was able to examine some dumps[1] and it always seemed to be a weird
>> situations. In one example (booting 3.0 HVM under Xen 3.4.3/2.6.18 dom0) the
>> lockup always seemed to occur when the delayed mtrr init took place. Cpu#0
>> seemed to have been starting the rendevouz (stop_cpu) but then been interrupted
>> and the other (I was using vcpu=2 for simplicity) was idling somewhere else but
>> had the mtrr
>> rendevouz handler queued up (just seemed to never get started).
>>
>> Things seemed to indicate some IPI problem but to be sure I went to bisect when
>> the problem started. I ended up with the following patch which, when reverted,
>> allows me to bring up a 3.0 HVM guest with more than one CPU without any problems.
>>
>> commit 99bbb3a84a99cd04ab16b998b20f01a72cfa9f4f
>> Author: Stefano Stabellini <email address hidden>
>> Date: Thu Dec 2 17:55:10 2010 +0000
>>
>> xen: PV on HVM: support PV spinlocks and IPIs
>>
>> Initialize PV spinlocks on boot CPU right after native_smp_prepare_cpus
>> (that switch to APIC mode and initialize APIC routing); on secondary
>> CPUs on CPU_UP_PREPARE.
>>
>> Enable the usage of event channels to send and receive IPIs when
>> running as a PV on HVM guest.
>>
>> Though I have not yet really understood why exactly this happens, I thought I
>> post the results so far. It feels like either signalling an IPI through the
>> eventchannel does not come through or goes to the wrong CPU. It did not seem to
>> cause the exactly same place to fail. Like said, the 3.0 guest running in the
>> CentOS dom0 was locking up early right after all CPUs were brought up. While
>> during the bisect (using a kernel between 2.6.38 and .39-rc1) the lockup was later.
>>
>> Maybe someone has a clue immediately. I will dig a bit deeper in the dumps in
>> the meantime. Looking at the description, which sounds like using event channels
>
> Anything turned up?

From the data structures everything seems to be set up correctly.

>> only was intended for PV on HVM guests, it is wrong in the first place to set
>> the xen ipi functions on the HVM side...
>
> On true HVM - sure, but on PVonHVM it sounds right.

Though exactly that seems to be what is happening. So I am looking at the guest
which is started as a HVM guest and the patch is modifying ipi delivery to be
tried as hypervisor calls instead of using the native apic method.

>>
>> -Stefan
>>
>> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/791850
>>
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