Date:	Wed, 9 Apr 2014 11:04:58 +0200
From:	Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@...rix.com>
To:	Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@...rix.com>,
	Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>
CC:	<keir@....org>, <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	<konrad@...nel.org>, <david.vrabel@...rix.com>,
	<jbeulich@...e.com>, <xen-devel@...ts.xenproject.org>,
	<boris.ostrovsky@...cle.com>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [XEN PATCH 1/2] hvm: Support more than 32 VCPUS when
 migrating.

On 09/04/14 10:33, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-04-08 at 14:53 -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 08:18:48PM +0200, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>>> On 08/04/14 19:25, konrad@...nel.org wrote:
>>>> From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>
>>>>
>>>> When we migrate an HVM guest, by default our shared_info can
>>>> only hold up to 32 CPUs. As such the hypercall
>>>> VCPUOP_register_vcpu_info was introduced which allowed us to
>>>> setup per-page areas for VCPUs. This means we can boot PVHVM
>>>> guest with more than 32 VCPUs. During migration the per-cpu
>>>> structure is allocated fresh by the hypervisor (vcpu_info_mfn
>>>> is set to INVALID_MFN) so that the newly migrated guest
>>>> can do make the VCPUOP_register_vcpu_info hypercall.
>>>>
>>>> Unfortunatly we end up triggering this condition:
>>>> /* Run this command on yourself or on other offline VCPUS. */
>>>>  if ( (v != current) && !test_bit(_VPF_down, &v->pause_flags) )
>>>>
>>>> which means we are unable to setup the per-cpu VCPU structures
>>>> for running vCPUS. The Linux PV code paths make this work by
>>>> iterating over every vCPU with:
>>>>
>>>>  1) is target CPU up (VCPUOP_is_up hypercall?)
>>>>  2) if yes, then VCPUOP_down to pause it.
>>>>  3) VCPUOP_register_vcpu_info
>>>>  4) if it was down, then VCPUOP_up to bring it back up
>>>>
>>>> But since VCPUOP_down, VCPUOP_is_up, and VCPUOP_up are
>>>> not allowed on HVM guests we can't do this. This patch
>>>> enables this.
>>>
>>> Hmmm, this looks like a very convoluted approach to something that could
>>> be solved more easily IMHO. What we do on FreeBSD is put all vCPUs into
>>> suspension, which means that all vCPUs except vCPU#0 will be in the
>>> cpususpend_handler, see:
>>>
>>> http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/amd64/mp_machdep.c?revision=263878&view=markup#l1460
>>
>> How do you 'suspend' them? If I remember there is a disadvantage of doing
>> this as you have to bring all the CPUs "offline". That in Linux means using
>> the stop_machine which is pretty big hammer and increases the latency for migration.
> 
> Yes, this is why the ability to have the toolstack save/restore the
> secondary vcpu state was added. It's especially important for
> checkpointing, but it's relevant to regular migrate as a performance
> improvement too.
> 
> It's not just stop-machine, IIRC it's a tonne of udev events relating to
> cpus off/onlinign etc too and all the userspace activity which that
> implies.

Well, what it's done on FreeBSD is nothing like that, it's called the
cpususpend handler, but it's not off-lining CPUs or anything like that,
it just places the CPU in a while loop inside of an IPI handler, so we
can do something like this will all APs:

while (suspended)
 pause();

register_vcpu_info();

So the registration of the vcpu_info area happens just after the CPU is
waken from suspension and before it leaves the IPI handler, and it's the
CPU itself the one that calls VCPUOP_register_vcpu_info (so we can avoid
the gate in Xen that prevents registering the vcpu_info area for CPUs
different that ourself).

Roger.

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