Re: [Alacrityvm-devel] [KVM PATCH v2 1/2] KVM: export lockless GSIattribute

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Wed Oct 28 2009 - 06:04:26 EST


On 10/26/2009 05:38 PM, Gregory Haskins wrote:
Instead of a lockless attribute, how about a ->set_atomic() method. For
msi this can be the same as ->set(), for non-msi it can be a function
that schedules the work (which will eventually call ->set()).

The benefit is that we make a decision only once, when preparing the
routing entry, and install that decision in the routing entry instead of
making it again and again later.
Yeah, I like this idea. I think we can also get rid of the custom
workqueue if we do this as well, TBD.
So I looked into this. It isn't straight forward because you need to
retain some kind of state across the deferment on a per-request basis
(not per-GSI). Today, this state is neatly tracked into the irqfd
object itself (e.g. it knows to toggle the GSI).

Yes, and it also contains the work_struct.

What if we make the work_struct (and any additional state) part of the set_atomic() argument list? Does it simplify things?

So while generalizing this perhaps makes sense at some point, especially
if irqfd-like interfaces get added, it probably doesn't make a ton of
sense to expend energy on it ATM. It is basically a generalization of
the irqfd deferrment code. Lets just wait until we have a user beyond
irqfd for now. Sound acceptable?

I'll look at v3, but would really like to disentangle this.

In the meantime, I found a bug in the irq_routing code, so I will submit
a v3 with this fix, as well as a few other things I improved in the v2
series.



--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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