Re: [RFC 00/10] hw/mos6522: VIA timer emulation fixes and improvements

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>]

On 01/09/2021 09:06, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:

> I'll have a go at some basic timer measurements using your patch to see what sort of 
> numbers I get for the latency here. Obviously QEMU doesn't guarantee response times 
> but over 20ms does seem high.

I was able to spend some time today looking at this and came up with 
https://github.com/mcayland/qemu/tree/via-hacks with the aim of starting with your 
patches to reduce the calls to the timer update functions (to reduce jitter) and 
fixing up the places where mos6522_update_irq() isn't called.

That seemed okay, but the part I'm struggling with at the moment is removing the 
re-assertion of the timer interrupt if the timer has expired when any of the 
registers are read i.e.

diff --git a/hw/misc/mos6522.c b/hw/misc/mos6522.c
index 3c33cbebde..9884d7e178 100644
--- a/hw/misc/mos6522.c
+++ b/hw/misc/mos6522.c
@@ -229,16 +229,7 @@ uint64_t mos6522_read(void *opaque, hwaddr addr, unsigned size)
  {
      MOS6522State *s = opaque;
      uint32_t val;
-    int64_t now = qemu_clock_get_ns(QEMU_CLOCK_VIRTUAL);

-    if (now >= s->timers[0].next_irq_time) {
-        mos6522_timer1_update(s, &s->timers[0], now);
-        s->ifr |= T1_INT;
-    }
-    if (now >= s->timers[1].next_irq_time) {
-        mos6522_timer2_update(s, &s->timers[1], now);
-        s->ifr |= T2_INT;
-    }
      switch (addr) {
      case VIA_REG_B:
          val = s->b;

If I apply this then I see a hang in about roughly 1 in 10 boots. Poking it with a 
debugger shows that the VIA1 timer interrupts are constantly being fired as IER and 
IFR have the timer 1 bit set, but it is being filtered out by SR being set to 0x2700 
on the CPU.

The existing code above isn't correct since T1_INT should only be asserted by the 
expiry of the timer 1 via mos6522_timer1(), so I'm wondering if this is tickling a 
CPU bug somewhere? In what circumstances could interrupts be disabled via SR but not 
enabled again?


ATB,

Mark.