Re: [Qemu-devel] Rethinking missed tick catchup

[Jan Kiszka]

On 2012-09-12 15:54, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We've been running into a lot of problems lately with Windows guests and
> I think they all ultimately could be addressed by revisiting the missed
> tick catchup algorithms that we use.  Mike and I spent a while talking
> about it yesterday and I wanted to take the discussion to the list to
> get some additional input.
> 
> Here are the problems we're seeing:
> 
> 1) Rapid reinjection can lead to time moving faster for short bursts of
>    time.  We've seen a number of RTC watchdog BSoDs and it's possible
>    that at least one cause is reinjection speed.
> 
> 2) When hibernating a host system, the guest gets is essentially paused
>    for a long period of time.  This results in a very large tick catchup
>    while also resulting in a large skew in guest time.
> 
>    I've gotten reports of the tick catchup consuming a lot of CPU time
>    from rapid delivery of interrupts (although I haven't reproduced this
>    yet).
> 
> 3) Windows appears to have a service that periodically syncs the guest
>    time with the hardware clock.  I've been told the resync period is an
>    hour.  For large clock skews, this can compete with reinjection
>    resulting in a positive skew in time (the guest can be ahead of the
>    host).
> 
> I've been thinking about an algorithm like this to address these
> problems:
> 
> A) Limit the number of interrupts that we reinject to the equivalent of
>    a small period of wallclock time.  Something like 60 seconds.
> 
> B) In the event of (A), trigger a notification in QEMU.  This is easy
>    for the RTC but harder for the in-kernel PIT.  Maybe it's a good time to
>    revisit usage of the in-kernel PIT?
> 
> C) On acculumated tick overflow, rely on using a qemu-ga command to
>    force a resync of the guest's time to the hardware wallclock time.
> 
> D) Whenever the guest reads the wallclock time from the RTC, reset all
>    accumulated ticks.
> 
> In order to do (C), we'll need to plumb qemu-ga through QMP.  Mike and I
> discussed a low-impact way of doing this (having a separate dispatch
> path for guest agent commands) and I'm confident we could do this for
> 1.3.
> 
> This would mean that management tools would need to consume qemu-ga
> through QMP.  Not sure if this is a problem for anyone.
> 
> I'm not sure whether it's worth trying to support this with the
> in-kernel PIT or not either.

As with our current discussion around fixing the PIC and its impact on
the PIT, we should try on the userspace model first and then check if
the design can be adapted to support in-kernel as well.

For which guests is the PIT important again? Old Linux kernels? Windows
should be mostly happy with the RTC - or the HPET.

> 
> Are there other issues with reinjection that people are aware of?  Does
> anything seem obviously wrong with the above?

We should take the chance and design everything in a way that the HPET
can finally be (left) enabled.

Jan

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