On 4/7/2015 10:23 PM, Luke Gorrie wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> I'm writing to follow up the previous discussion about memory barriers in
> virtio-net device implementations, and Cc'ing the DPDK list because I
> believe this is relevant to them too.
>
> First, thanks again for getting in touch and reviewing our code.
>
> I have now found a missed case where we *do* require a hardware memory
> barrier on x86 in our vhost/virtio-net device. That is when checking the
> interrupt suppression flag after updating used->idx. This is needed because
> x86 can reorder the write to used->idx after the read from avail->flags,
> and that causes the guest to see a stale value of used->idx after it
> toggles interrupt suppression.
luke:
1. host read the flag. 2 guest toggles the flag 3.guest checks the used.
4. host update used.
Is this your case?
>
> If I may spell out my mental model, for the sake of being corrected and/or
> as an example of how third party developers are reading and interpreting
> the Virtio-net spec:
>
> Relating this to Virtio 1.0, the most relevant section is 3.2.1 (Supplying
> Buffers to the Device) which calls for two "suitable memory barriers". The
> spec talks about these from the driver perspective, but they are both
> relevant to the device side too.
>
> The first barrier (write to descriptor table before write to used->idx) is
> implicit on x86 because writes by the same core are not reordered. This
> means that no explicit hardware barrier is needed. (A compiler barrier may
> be needed, however.)
>
> The second memory barrier (write to used->idx before reading avail->flags)
> is not implicit on x86 because stores are reordered after loads. So an
> explicit hardware memory barrier is needed.
>
> I hope that is a correct assessment of the situation. (Forgive my
> x86centricity, I am sure that seems very foreign to kernel hackers.)
>
> If this assessment is correct then the DPDK developers might also want to
> review librte_vhost/vhost_rxtx.c and consider adding a hardware memory
> barrier between writing used->idx and reading avail->flags.
>
> Cheers,
> -Luke
>
> P.S. I notice that the Linux virtio-net driver does not seem to tolerate
> spurious interrupts, even though the Virtio 1.0 spec requires this
> ("must"). On 3.13.11-ckt15 I see them trigger an "irq nobody cared" kernel
> log message and then the irq is disabled. If that sounds suspicious I can
> supply more information.
>
>
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