There is a reliable way to make a CPU hotunplug fail in the pseries
machine. Hotplug a CPU A, then offline all other CPUs inside the guest
but A. When trying to hotunplug A the guest kernel will refuse to do it,
because A is now the last online CPU of the guest. PAPR has no 'error
callback' in this situation to report back to the platform, so the guest
kernel will deny the unplug in silent and QEMU will never know what
happened. The unplug pending state of A will remain until the guest is
shutdown or rebooted.
Previous attempts of fixing it (see [1] and [2]) were aimed at trying to
mitigate the effects of the problem. In [1] we were trying to guess
which guest CPUs were online to forbid hotunplug of the last online CPU
in the QEMU layer, avoiding the scenario described above because QEMU is
now failing in behalf of the guest. This is not robust because the last
online CPU of the guest can change while we're in the middle of the
unplug process, and our initial assumptions are now invalid. In [2] we
were accepting that our unplug process is uncertain and the user should
be allowed to spam the IRQ hotunplug queue of the guest in case the CPU
hotunplug fails.
This patch presents another alternative, using the timeout
infrastructure introduced in the previous patch. CPU hotunplugs in the
pSeries machine will now timeout after 15 seconds. This is a long time
for a single CPU unplug to occur, regardless of guest load - although
the user is *strongly* encouraged to *not* hotunplug devices from a
guest under high load - and we can be sure that something went wrong if
it takes longer than that for the guest to release the CPU (the same
can't be said about memory hotunplug - more on that in the next patch).
Timing out the unplug operation will reset the unplug state of the CPU
and allow the user to try it again, regardless of the error situation
that prevented the hotunplug to occur. Of all the not so pretty
fixes/mitigations for CPU hotunplug errors in pSeries, timing out the
operation is an admission that we have no control in the process, and
must assume the worst case if the operation doesn't succeed in a
sensible time frame.
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-01/msg03353.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-01/msg04400.html
Reported-by: Xujun Ma <xuma@redhat.com>
Fixes: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1911414
Reviewed-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Henrique Barboza <danielhb413@gmail.com>
Message-Id: <20210222194531.62717-5-danielhb413@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
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