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authorAnthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>2013-04-05 08:46:00 -0500
committerAnthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>2013-04-05 12:53:33 -0500
commit893986fe94eb229f2317f50fac0e35e068eb66ba (patch)
tree2fb99f66ab6e99e632980a96cdfee3e9d21d0067
parentd185c094b404b4ff392b77d1244c0233da7d53bd (diff)
main-loop: drop the BQL if the I/O appears to be spinning
The char-flow refactoring introduced a busy-wait that depended on an action from the VCPU thread. However, the VCPU thread could never take that action because the busy-wait starved the VCPU thread of the BQL because it never dropped the mutex while running select. Paolo doesn't want to drop this optimization for fear that we will stop detecting these busy waits. I'm afraid to keep this optimization even with the busy-wait fixed because I think a similar problem can occur just with heavy I/O thread load manifesting itself as VCPU pauses. As a compromise, introduce an artificial timeout after a thousand iterations but print a rate limited warning when this happens. This let's us still detect when this condition occurs without it being a fatal error. Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com> Message-id: 1365169560-11012-1-git-send-email-aliguori@us.ibm.com
-rw-r--r--main-loop.c25
1 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/main-loop.c b/main-loop.c
index eb80ff369f..f46aece8b8 100644
--- a/main-loop.c
+++ b/main-loop.c
@@ -188,14 +188,39 @@ static void glib_pollfds_poll(void)
}
}
+#define MAX_MAIN_LOOP_SPIN (1000)
+
static int os_host_main_loop_wait(uint32_t timeout)
{
int ret;
+ static int spin_counter;
glib_pollfds_fill(&timeout);
+ /* If the I/O thread is very busy or we are incorrectly busy waiting in
+ * the I/O thread, this can lead to starvation of the BQL such that the
+ * VCPU threads never run. To make sure we can detect the later case,
+ * print a message to the screen. If we run into this condition, create
+ * a fake timeout in order to give the VCPU threads a chance to run.
+ */
+ if (spin_counter > MAX_MAIN_LOOP_SPIN) {
+ static bool notified;
+
+ if (!notified) {
+ fprintf(stderr,
+ "main-loop: WARNING: I/O thread spun for %d iterations\n",
+ MAX_MAIN_LOOP_SPIN);
+ notified = true;
+ }
+
+ timeout = 1;
+ }
+
if (timeout > 0) {
+ spin_counter = 0;
qemu_mutex_unlock_iothread();
+ } else {
+ spin_counter++;
}
ret = g_poll((GPollFD *)gpollfds->data, gpollfds->len, timeout);