Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v7 0/7] push mmio dispatch out of big lock

[Paolo Bonzini]

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Il 04/05/2013 12:42, Jan Kiszka ha scritto:
> On 2013-05-04 11:47, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> Il 03/05/2013 10:04, Jan Kiszka ha scritto:
>>> We can't change the semantics of opaque as long as old_mmio /
>>> old_portio are around. But we need a flag anyway to indicate if
>>> a region is depending on BQL or not. Adding a separate "Object
>>> *owner" to MemoryRegion can serve both purposes. Then we define
>>> something like
>>> 
>>> void memory_region_set_local_locking(MemoryRegion *mr, bool
>>> local_locking, Object *owner);
>>> 
>>> to control the property (if local_locking is true, owner must
>>> be non-NULL, of course). That's quite similar to my old
>>> prototype here that had
>>> memory_region_set/clear_global_locking.
>> 
>> I think setting the owner can be done separately from enabling
>> local lock.  For example, memory_region_find could also have a
>> variant that adds a ref to the owner.  It would be very similar
>> to what Ping Fan is doing in the virtio-dataplane's HostMem data
>> structure.
> 
> That's trivial to break up, but I'm not sure if there will be
> reasonable scenarios where a region requires reference counting
> without being able to work without the BQL. RAM, e.g., should
> always work BQL-free (once we have the infrastructure in place).

I think we need to add an owner to all regions (tedious, but
doable---perhaps even scriptable).  The current code covers
address_space_rw, but memory_region_find remains callable only from
BQL-protected regions.  The caller of memory_region_find needs to be
able to inspect the MemoryRegion, even if it is just to fail on
non-RAM regions.  I would like to switch the dataplane code to use
memory_region_find.

BTW, have you seen
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/548909/b6fdd846f1232be6/ ? [*]  Perhaps
we can adopt something like that, it solves the same exact problem
that we have, and it's a well-known solution from the literature.

        [*]  The "subscriber link" mechanism allows an LWN.net
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             favorite LWN articles.

> And memory_region_find should likely always increment a reference
> if the target region has an owner. We should convert its users to
> properly dereference the region once done with it.

Yes.  But this is what requires you to have an owner for all regions.

Paolo
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