RE: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Re-enable MSI support

[Espen Skoglund <espen.skoglund@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Kevin Tian]
>> From: Espen Skoglund
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 7:34 PM
>>
>> [Yunhong Jiang]
>>> This patch try to do some cleanup for these issues.
>>> 1) The basic idea is to remove the pci_dev's lock, instead, we try
>>>    to use the big pcidevs_lock to protect the whole pci_dev
>>>    stuff. It including both pci_dev adding/removing, and also the
>>>    assignment of the devices. We checked the code and seems there is
>>>    no critical code path for this. We try to use fine-grained lock
>>>    and seems the code will be very tricky.
>>> 2) Split the pci_enable_msi into two step, firstly it will just
>>>    construct the msi_desc through pci_enable_msi without holding the
>>>    irq_desc lock, and then it will setup msi through setup_msi_irq
>>>    with irq_desc holded.
>>> 3) Change the iommu->lock and hd->mapping_lock to be irq_save. 
>>> 4) Fix to some minor issues.
>>
>>> Now the lock sequence is: pcidevs_lock -> domai's event_lock ->
>>> iommu's lock -> hvm_iommu's mapping_lock. The irq_desc's lock will
>>> always be the last lock be hold for peformance consideration.
>>
>> So what exactly is it that pcidevs_lock is supposed to "protect" now?
>> Does it indicate that someone is holding a reference to a pci_dev?
>> Does it indicate that someone will modify some pci_dev?  Does it
>> indicate that someone is messing around with interrupts or MSI
>> descriptors?

> I think it protects all above. As those operations are all rare, such a
> big lock can avoid complex lock/unlock sequence regarding to different
> paths to different resource of an assigned device.

Except, since it is used as a read_lock most of the time it does not
actually protect things in the way a spinlock would do.

         eSk



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