Re: kvm vmload/vmsave vs tss.ist

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Thu Dec 25 2008 - 12:41:48 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

i'd suggest to reuse the irq-stacks for this. Right now on 64-bit we've got the following stack layout: 8K process stacks, a 16K IRQ stack on each CPU, shared by all IRQs. Then we have the IST stacks with weird sizes: debug:8K, the others: 4K.

this has to be done carefully though, as there's a subtle detail here: right now the pda_irqcount and the pda_irqstackptr logic in entry_64.S is not re-entry safe and relies on IRQs being off.

If critical exceptions are moved to the IRQ stack then %rsp switching to the IRQ stack has to be done atomically: instead of using the pda_irqcount check the %rsp value itself should be checked against pda_irqstackptr - if it's within that 16K range then we are already on the IRQ stack and do not need to switch to it but can just use the current %rsp.

I think it's enough to switch %rsp before incrementing irqcount, no?

--
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.

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