On 16 June 2015 at 12:53, Peter Maydell <address@hidden> wrote:
In particular I think the
'do cpu_exit if one CPU triggers an interrupt on another'
approach is probably good, but I need to investigate why
it isn't working on your test programs without that extra
'level &&' condition first...
I've figured out what's happening here, and it's an accidental
artefact of our GIC implementation. What happens is:
* cpu 0 does an IPI, which turns into "raise IRQ line on cpu 1"
* arm_cpu_set_irq logic causes us to cpu_exit() cpu 0
* cpu 1 does then run; however pretty early on it does a read
on the GIC to acknowledge the interrupt
* this causes the function gic_update() to run, which recalculates
the current state and sets CPU interrupt lines accordingly;
among other things this results in an unnecessary but harmless
call to arm_cpu_set_irq(CPU #0, irq, 0)
* without the "level && " clause in the conditional, that causes
us to cpu_exit() cpu 1
* we then start running cpu 0 again, which is pointless, and
since there's no further irq traffic we don't yield til 0
reaches the end of its timeslice
So basically without the level check we do make 0 yield to 1
as it should, but we then spuriously yield back to 0 again
pretty much immediately.
Next up: see if it gives us a perf improvement on Linux guests...
-- PMM