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xen-devel
Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] add support for XCHG instruction accessing	APIC
 
On 5 Apr 2006, at 15:01, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
 In fact I'm pretty sure the locking is not needed even if we did care 
about atomicity. You're only protecting guest accesses from other 
guest accesses, and each VCPU has its own local APIC model, so there 
cannot be multiple simultaneous guest accesses to a single local 
APIC.
 
 My only argument in favor of using the lock would be for completeness 
of the emulation. You are
absolutely right in that for Linux there seems to be no need to hold 
the lock. My concern is that
other OSs  may treat this differently. And if we don't have sources, 
it may be somewhat difficult
to  figure out that the atomicity (or lack of it) was the cause of a 
problem.
 If, however, there is a strong feeling that we don't need the lock, I 
am happy to drop it.
I guess you are mostly unhappy about adding a new field to hvm_domain, 
not about performance
impact?
 
 
 Yes, also my second argument was that there is *no way* for two VCPUs 
to conflict on a local APIC access, since LAPIC accesses are always to 
the VCPU's own LAPIC. So there is no potential concurrency that needs 
to be serialised, regardless of the guest OS.
 -- Keir
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