Re: [PATCH 1/2] hw/nvme: Implement shadow doorbell buffer support

[John Levon]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2022 at 07:22:22PM +0800, Jinhao Fan wrote:

> >>> Isn't this racy against the driver? Compare
> >>> https://github.com/spdk/spdk/blob/master/lib/nvmf/vfio_user.c#L1317
> >> 
> >> QEMU has full memory barriers on dma read/write, so I believe this is
> >> safe?
> > 
> > But don't you need to re-read the tail still, for example:
> 
> I think we also have a check for concurrent update on the tail. After writing 
> eventidx, we read the tail again. It is here:
> 
> @@ -5854,6 +5943,11 @@ static void nvme_process_sq(void *opaque)
>              req->status = status;
>              nvme_enqueue_req_completion(cq, req);
>          }
> +
> +        if (n->dbbuf_enabled) {
> +            nvme_update_sq_eventidx(sq);
> +            nvme_update_sq_tail(sq);
> +        }

Ah, and we go around the loop another time in this case.

> > driver                      device
> > 
> >                     eventidx is 3
> > 
> > write 4 to tail
> >                     read tail of 4
> > write 5 to tail
> > read eventidx of 3
> > nvme_dbbuf_need_event (1)
> > 
> >                     set eventidx to 4
> 
> Therefore, at this point, we read the tail of 5.

The driver could still update the tail after the nvme_update_sq_tail() above.
However, the driver ordering (read tail, then eventidx), does mean that it would
then do an mmio write, so yes, this looks safe, thank you.

regards
john