A deadlock condition potentially exists if a vhost-user process needs
to request something to QEMU on the slave channel while processing a
vhost-user message.
This doesn't seem to affect any vhost-user implementation so far, but
this is currently biting the upcoming enablement of DAX with virtio-fs.
The issue is being observed when the guest does an emergency reboot while
a mapping still exits in the DAX window, which is very easy to get with
a busy enough workload (e.g. as simulated by blogbench [1]) :
- QEMU sends VHOST_USER_GET_VRING_BASE to virtiofsd.
- In order to complete the request, virtiofsd then asks QEMU to remove
the mapping on the slave channel.
All these dialogs are synchronous, hence the deadlock.
As pointed out by Stefan Hajnoczi:
When QEMU's vhost-user master implementation sends a vhost-user protocol
message, vhost_user_read() does a "blocking" read during which slave_fd
is not monitored by QEMU.
The natural solution for this issue is an event loop. The main event
loop cannot be nested though since we have no guarantees that its
fd handlers are prepared for re-entrancy.
Introduce a new event loop that only monitors the chardev I/O for now
in vhost_user_read() and push the actual reading to a one-shot handler.
A subsequent patch will teach the loop to monitor and process messages
from the slave channel as well.
[1] https://github.com/jedisct1/Blogbench
Suggested-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>
Message-Id: <20210312092212.782255-6-groug@kaod.org>
Reviewed-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
a7f523c7d1