WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-devel

Re: [Xen-devel] new netfront and occasional receive path lockup

To: Christophe Saout <christophe@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] new netfront and occasional receive path lockup
From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:46:37 -0700
Cc: "Xu, Dongxiao" <dongxiao.xu@xxxxxxxxx>, xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Delivery-date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:47:26 -0700
Envelope-to: www-data@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <1282495384.12843.11.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
List-help: <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=help>
List-id: Xen developer discussion <xen-devel.lists.xensource.com>
List-post: <mailto:xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
List-subscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel>, <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=subscribe>
List-unsubscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel>, <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=unsubscribe>
References: <1282495384.12843.11.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sender: xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100720 Fedora/3.1.1-1.fc13 Lightning/1.0b2pre Thunderbird/3.1.1
 On 08/22/2010 09:43 AM, Christophe Saout wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been playing with some of the new pvops code, namely DomU guest
> code.  What I've been observing on one of the virtual machines is that
> the network (vif) is dying after about ten to sixty minutes of uptime.
> The unfortunate thing here is that I can only repoduce it on a
> production VM and have been unlucky so far to trigger the bug on a test
> machine.  While this has not been tragic - rebooting fixed the issue,
> unfortunately I can't spend very much time on debugging after the issue
> pops up.

Ah, OK.  I've seen this a couple of times as well.  And it just happened
to me then...


> Now, what is happening is that the receive path goes dead.  The DomU can
> send packets to Dom0 and those are visible using tcpdump on the Dom0 on
> the virtual interface, but not the other way around.

I hadn't got to that level of diagnosis, but I can confirm that that's
what seems to be happening here too.

> Now, I have done more than one change at a time (I'd like to avoid going
> into pinning it down since I can only reproduce it on a production
> machine, as I said, so suggestions are welcome), but my suspicion is
> that it might have to do with the new "smart polling" feature in
> xen/netfront.  Note that I have also updated Dom0 to pull in the latest
> dom0/backend and netback changes, just to make sure it's not due to an
> issue that has been fixed there, but I'm still seeing the same.

I agree.  I think I started seeing this once I merged smartpoll into
netfront.

    J

> The production machine is a machine that doesn't have much network load,
> but deals with a lot of small network requests (DNS and smtp mostly).  A
> workload which is hard to reproduce on the test machine.  Heavy network
> load (NFS, FTP and so on) for days hasn't triggered the problem.  Also,
> segmentation offloading and similar settings don't have any effect.
>
> The machine has 2 physical and the VM 2 virtual CPUs, DomU has PREEMPT
> enabled.
>
> I've been looking at the code, if there might be a race condition
> somewhere, something like where one could run into a situation where the
> hrtimer doesn't run and Dom0 believes the DomU should be polling and
> doesn't emit an interrupt or something, but I'm afraid I don't know
> enough to judge this (I mean, there are spinlocks which look safe to
> me).
>
> Do you have any suggestions what to try?  I can trigger the issue on the
> production VM again, but debugging should not take more than a few
> minutes if it happens.  Access is only possible via the console.
> Neither Dom0 nor the guest show anything unusual in the kernel message
> and continue to behave normally after the network goes dead (also able
> to shut down the guest normally).
>
> Thanks,
>       Christophe
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-devel mailing list
> Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
>


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel