On Fri, Feb 09, 2018 at 08:49:49AM -0500, Luiz Capitulino wrote: > On Fri, 9 Feb 2018 08:56:19 +0100 > Viktor Mihajlovski <mihaj...@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote: > > > On 08.02.2018 21:33, Eduardo Habkost wrote: > > > On Thu, Feb 08, 2018 at 11:17:32AM -0500, Luiz Capitulino wrote: > > > [...] > > >> The "halted" field is somewhat controversial. On the one hand, > > >> it offers a convenient way to know if a guest CPU is idle or > > >> running. On the other hand, it's a field that can change many > > >> times a second. In fact, the halted state can change even > > >> before query-cpus-fast has returned. This makes one wonder if > > >> this field should be dropped all together. Having the "halted" > > >> field as optional gives a better option for dropping it in > > >> the future, since we can just stop returning it. > > > > > > I'd just drop it, unless we find a use case where it's really > > > useful. > > I don't think there's any, unless for debugging purposes. > > I'm keeping it mainly for s390. Viktor, libvirt is still using > this field in s390, no? > > Dropping halted and having management software still using query-cpus > because of halted would be a total failure of query-cpus-fast.
If I understood correctly, the CpuInfoS390::cpu_state field added by Viktor in another patch[1] would replace "halted" for the s390 case. I'm assuming QEMU will be able to return that field without interrupting the VCPUs. Viktor, is that correct? [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-02/msg02032.html > > > > Also, the code that sets/clears cpu->halted is target-specific, > > > so I wouldn't be so sure that simply checking for > > > !kvm_irqchip_in_kernel() is enough on all targets. > > I checked the code and had the impression it was enough, but > I don't have experience with other archs. So, would be nice > if other archs maintainers could review this. I'll try to ping them. I think we need to take a step back and rethink: 1) What the field is supposed to mean? The semantics of "halted" are completely unclear. What exactly we want to communicate to libvirt/management? 2) On which cases the information (whatever it means) is really useful/important? If you are excluding cases with in-kernel irqchip, you are already excluding most users. > > > Right, the present patch effectively disables halted anyway (including > > s390). > > No, it doesn't. It only disables halted for archs that require going > to the kernel to get it. It disables it for all architectures that implement in-kernel irqchip: x86, arm, s390. The only existing user of "halted" is s390-specific code in libvirt, and your patch won't return it on s390, so nobody seems to benefit from it. > > > So it may be cleaner to just drop it right now. > > Assuming the presence of architecure-specific data, libvirt can derive a > > halted state (or an equivalent thereof) from query-cpus-fast returned > > information. > > This is a different proposal. You're proposing moving the halted state > to a CPU-specific field. This is doable if that's what we want. I think it's a valid approach to return a target-specific field first, and later try to come up with a generic (and clearly defined) abstraction to represent the same information (either inside QEMU or inside libvirt). -- Eduardo