Re: [PATCH 0/5 V5] Avoid soft lockup message when KVM is stopped byhost

From: Marcelo Tosatti
Date: Wed Dec 14 2011 - 07:19:51 EST


On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 02:40:58PM +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
> >>When a guest kernel is stopped by the host hypervisor it can look like a soft
> >>lockup to the guest kernel. This false warning can mask later soft lockup
> >>warnings which may be real. This patch series adds a method for a host
> >>hypervisor to communicate to a guest kernel that it is being stopped. The
> >>final patch in the series has the watchdog check this flag when it goes to
> >>issue a soft lockup warning and skip the warning if the guest knows it was
> >>stopped.
> >>
> >>It was attempted to solve this in Qemu, but the side effects of saving and
> >>restoring the clock and tsc for each vcpu put the wall clock of the guest behind
> >>by the amount of time of the pause. This forces a guest to have ntp running
> >>in order to keep the wall clock accurate.
>
> Guests need to run NTP regardless, not only the virtualization layer
> add some skew, the physical world is not that perfect.
> btw: traditional NTP client won't sync the time automatically if the
> diff is > 0.5%.
>
> >
> >Having this controlled from userspace means it doesn't work for SIGSTOP
> >or for long scheduling delays. What about doing this automatically
> >based on preempt notifiers?
> >
> >
>
> Isn't it solved by steal time?

No.

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/