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] Prepping a bugfix push

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 16:37 +0000, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote: 
> On 12/04/09 07:50, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 07:46 +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> >    
> >> I've been doing regular suspend/resumes not checkpoint ones as Brendan
> >> is doing, I did try a couple of checkpointed ones yesterday and they
> >> failed, IIRC with a similar softlockup to this one.
> >>      
> > So what is happening is that the device event channels are getting torn
> > down by the resume handler and never completely reinstated in the
> > cancelled suspend (aka checkpoint) case.
> >    
> 
> Hm.
> 
> > In 2.6.18 there was a separate ->suspend_cancel() callback for each
> > driver, called instead of the ->resume() callback in exactly these
> > circumstances. The cancel callback doesn't do any of the teardown, in
> > fact for blkfront it doesn't even exist.
> >
> > (As a proof of concept, commenting out the entire contents of
> > blkfront_resume and netfront_resume makes checkpointing work OK for me,
> > at the cost of breaking regular resume, of course)
> >
> > pv-ops uses the generic power management infrastructure which does not
> > have a concept of cancelling a suspend. Perhaps it should? Otherwise a
> > different solution will be required, I'm not sure what that might be yet
> > yet.
> >    
> 
> Well, the obvious one is to treat it as a full suspend followed by 
> immediate resume.  That is, just remove all the special case handling 
> for checkpoint, and let it do the normal resume stuff when the hypercall 
> returns.

I'm not sure how much that will help, some of the resume stuff relies on
the domain actually changing underneath, i.e. the backends are torn down
and resetup by the tools and therefore expect a fresh reconnection, the
hypervisor side of event channels is implicitly reset (the kernel just
resets its own state) etc. None of these things happen during a
checkpoint. Presumably those who are interested in checkpointing would
prefer them not to happen in order to remain fast.

> I think the PM core can fail to suspend; it just resumes anything that 
> has been suspended so far.

An optional separate hook for that case (called in preference to
->resume) might be acceptable upstream? Adding a parameter to the
->resume handler itself might also be acceptable but would involve more
churn.

Ian.


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