47 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
47 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
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Record/replay mechanism, that could be enabled through icount mode, expects
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the virtual devices to satisfy the following requirements.
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The main idea behind this document is that everything that affects
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the guest state during execution in icount mode should be deterministic.
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Timers
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======
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All virtual devices should use virtual clock for timers that change the guest
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state. Virtual clock is deterministic, therefore such timers are deterministic
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too.
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Virtual devices can also use realtime clock for the events that do not change
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the guest state directly. When the clock ticking should depend on VM execution
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speed, use virtual clock with EXTERNAL attribute. It is not deterministic,
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but its speed depends on the guest execution. This clock is used by
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the virtual devices (e.g., slirp routing device) that lie outside the
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replayed guest.
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Bottom halves
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=============
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Bottom half callbacks, that affect the guest state, should be invoked through
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replay_bh_schedule_event or replay_bh_schedule_oneshot_event functions.
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Their invocations are saved in record mode and synchronized with the existing
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log in replay mode.
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Saving/restoring the VM state
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=============================
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All fields in the device state structure (including virtual timers)
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should be restored by loadvm to the same values they had before savevm.
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Avoid accessing other devices' state, because the order of saving/restoring
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is not defined. It means that you should not call functions like
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'update_irq' in post_load callback. Save everything explicitly to avoid
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the dependencies that may make restoring the VM state non-deterministic.
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Stopping the VM
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===============
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Stopping the guest should not interfere with its state (with the exception
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of the network connections, that could be broken by the remote timeouts).
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VM can be stopped at any moment of replay by the user. Restarting the VM
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after that stop should not break the replay by the unneeded guest state change.
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