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RE: [Xen-devel] resume of HVM guest without PV drivers

To: "Keir Fraser" <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [Xen-devel] resume of HVM guest without PV drivers
From: "James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 21:01:17 +1000
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Thread-index: AcoXSttlGJsRSvrjSJi6E2VJAu63JAAAmHJVAAAjPVA=
Thread-topic: [Xen-devel] resume of HVM guest without PV drivers
> On 07/08/2009 11:35, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Besides that, doing hypercalls here also requires that I'll be able
to re-
> > setup the hypercall (or the hypercall page) in case I got migrated
> > between VMX and SVM. While this could certainly be done in a fixup
> > handler invoked from #UD (a little tricky for the hypercall page
case), I
> > find it preferable to synchronously fix things up beforehand.
> 
> Won't you always have a race between checking for migration and then
> entering the cpu-specific hypercall stub?
> 

That's what I was thinking too. The GPLPV drivers (and presumably the
Linux PVonHVM drivers) are very careful about making sure that nothing
else can touch any of the hypercall related stuff after a resume,
keeping all CPU's spinning at a high irql (interrupts disabled etc)
until the hypercall page is restored.

If you are using the hypercall page for anything then I think you need
to have your driver manage the suspend operation too... I think that
xen/xend becomes aware that you are running PV drivers on the basis that
you have set a watch on the shutdown xenstore key, although I'm possibly
wrong about that.

James


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