Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 4/5] virtio-blk: release reference to RAM's memoryRegion

[liu ping fan]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 12:48:12PM +0800, liu ping fan wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 04:20:33PM +0800, Liu Ping Fan wrote:
>> >> From: Liu Ping Fan <address@hidden>
>> >>
>> >> virtio-blk will reference to RAM's memoryRegion when the req has been
>> >> done.  So we can avoid to call bdrv_drain_all() when RAM hot unplug.
>> >
>> > How does the hot unplug operation work without bdrv_drain_all()?  In
>> > other words, how do we safely remove a MemoryRegion and wait for it to
>> > become unreferenced?
>> >
>> bdrv_drain_all() forces the end of usage of memoryRegion. But we can
>> let the req done callback ( marks this req finish the end of usage of
>> mr) to release the refcnt of memoryRegion.
>
> Yes.  What I'm interested in is the wait mechanism for the QEMU thread
> to wait until the memory region(s) become unreferenced.
>
> This patch series is only one half of the memory unplug puzzle and I'd
> like to understand how the other half - the unplug operation - will be
> implemented.
>
The unplug patch is still under developed, more detail please refer to
Vasilis Liaskovitis's patches:
   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2012-12/msg02693.html

> Just a summary would be interesting - especially how a QEMU thread will
> wait until memory regions have been released.  The reference counter
> doesn't have any notification that would allow a blocking wait.
>
Sorry, not understand "a blocking wait".  To summary, when
initializing, RamDevice's refcnt == 1, and unplug will release this
one. Meanwhile, all the MemoryListeners which are async with unplug,
will inc refcnt to against the unplug event.
> Then you have the RCU concept.  So maybe the unplug operation will not
> block but instead be called several times from the event loop until all
> references have been released?
>
As mentioned above, unplug will put its own refcnt. And unplug will not block.


> Stefan