On 17.08.2017 12:18, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

On 17/08/2017 11:55, David Hildenbrand wrote:

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On 17.08.2017 11:44, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

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On 17/08/2017 11:28, Cornelia Huck wrote:

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On Thu, 17 Aug 2017 11:16:59 +0200
Paolo Bonzini [off-list ref] wrote:

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On 17/08/2017 09:36, Cornelia Huck wrote:

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What if we just sent a "vcpu move" request to all vcpus with the new 
pointer after it moved? That way the vcpu thread itself would be 
responsible for the migration to the new memory region. Only if all 
vcpus successfully moved, keep rolling (and allow foreign get_vcpu again).

That way we should be basically lock-less and scale well. For additional 
icing, feel free to increase the vcpu array x2 every time it grows to 
not run into the slow path too often.  

I'd prefer the rcu approach: This is a mechanism already understood
well, no need to come up with a new one that will likely have its own
share of problems.  

What Alex is proposing _is_ RCU, except with a homegrown
synchronize_rcu.  Using kvm->srcu seems to be the best of both worlds.

I'm worried a bit about the 'homegrown' part, though.

I agree, that's why I'm suggesting SRCU instead.  But it's a trick that
has its uses.  For example, if you were only doing reads from a work
queue, flush_work_queue could be used as the "homegrown
synchronize_rcu".  In KVM you might use kvm_make_all_cpus_request, I guess.

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I also may be misunderstanding what Alex means with "vcpu move"...

My interpretation was "resizing the array" (so it moves in memory).

Unpopular opinion: Let's keep it simple first (straight rcu) and
optimize later on.

RCU vs. SRCU is about correctness, not optimization...

Paolo

Guess I am still missing the point why RCU cannot be used here.

-- 

Thanks,

David