Re: possible I/O emulation state machine issue

[Paul Durrant <Paul.Durrant@citrix.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jan Beulich [mailto:JBeulich@suse.com]
> Sent: 29 March 2018 07:27
> To: Paul Durrant <Paul.Durrant@citrix.com>
> Cc: Andrew Cooper <Andrew.Cooper3@citrix.com>; xen-devel <xen-
> devel@lists.xenproject.org>
> Subject: RE: possible I/O emulation state machine issue
> 
> >>> On 28.03.18 at 18:22, <Paul.Durrant@citrix.com> wrote:
> >> From: Jan Beulich [mailto:JBeulich@suse.com]
> >> Sent: 28 March 2018 16:59
> >>
> >> Simply timing, perhaps. In any event, newest logs suggest we have
> >> an issue with Windows paging out the page the data for the
> >> REP OUTSW is coming from while the port I/O part of the operation
> >> is pending qemu's completion. Upon retry the linear->physical
> >> translation fails, and we leave incorrect state in place.
> >>
> >> I thought we cache the translation result, thus avoiding the need
> >> for a translation during the retry cycle, so either I'm misremembering
> >> or this doesn't work as intended. And in fact doing the translation a
> >> second time (with the potential of it failing) is wrong here - when the
> >> port access has occurred, we must not fail the emulation anymore
> >> (repeating the port write would probably be fine for the VGA, but
> >> would hardly be fine for e.g. an IDE interface).
> >
> > Yes, I thought we made sure all reps were completed using cached
> > translations before returning to guest.
> 
> We do this only for actual MMIO accesses, not for RAM ones,
> afaics.
> 
> I think I see a way to deal with the specific case here, but we'll
> certainly need to make things work properly in the general case.
> That's not something reasonable to be done for 4.11 though.
> 

Page table modification racing with an emulation sounds pretty bad though. I guess that if the damage is only limited to the guest though it's not something that requires immediate fix.

> Suppressing the stdvga port intercepts has, btw, not helped the
> situation.
> 

That surprises me. The whole string emulation should go out to QEMU without being broken up in that case, and since it's an outsw I don't see why there would be any retry of the linear->physical translation during completion.

  Paul

> Jan


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