[Qemu-devel] Re: Role of qemu_fair_mutex

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 08:17:26AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 01/03/2011 04:01 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> >On 01/03/2011 11:46 AM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> >>Hi,
> >>
> >>at least in kvm mode, the qemu_fair_mutex seems to have lost its
> >>function of balancing qemu_global_mutex access between the io-thread and
> >>vcpus. It's now only taken by the latter, isn't it?
> >>
> >>This and the fact that qemu-kvm does not use this kind of lock made me
> >>wonder what its role is and if it is still relevant in practice. I'd
> >>like to unify the execution models of qemu-kvm and qemu, and this lock
> >>is the most obvious difference (there are surely more subtle ones as
> >>well...).
> >>
> >
> >IIRC it was used for tcg, which has a problem that kvm doesn't
> >have: a tcg vcpu needs to hold qemu_mutex when it runs, which
> >means there will always be contention on qemu_mutex.  In the
> >absence of fairness, the tcg thread could dominate qemu_mutex and
> >starve the iothread.
> 
> No, it's actually the opposite IIRC.
> 
> TCG relies on the following behavior.   A guest VCPU runs until 1)
> it encounters a HLT instruction 2) an event occurs that forces the
> TCG execution to break.
> 
> (2) really means that the TCG thread receives a signal.  Usually,
> this is the periodic timer signal.
> 
> When the TCG thread, it needs to let the IO thread run for at least
> one iteration.  Coordinating the execution of the IO thread such
> that it's guaranteed to run at least once and then having it drop
> the qemu mutex long enough for the TCG thread to acquire it is the
> purpose of the qemu_fair_mutex.

Its the vcpu threads that starve the IO thread.