[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] vhost: flush used->idx update before reading avail->flags

[Luke Gorrie]

On 9 June 2015 at 09:04, Linhaifeng <haifeng.lin at huawei.com> wrote:

> On 2015/4/24 15:27, Luke Gorrie wrote:
> > You should be able to test it like this:
> >
> > 1. Boot two Linux kernel (e.g. 3.13) guests.
> > 2. Connect them via vhost switch.
> > 3. Run continuous traffic between them (e.g. iperf).
> >
> > I would expect that within a reasonable timeframe (< 1 hour) one of the
> > guests' network interfaces will hang indefinitely due to a missed
> interrupt.
> >
> > You won't be able to reproduce this using DPDK guests because they are
> not
> > using the same interrupt suppression method.
>
> I think this patch can't resole this problem. On the other hand we still
> would miss interrupt.
>

For what it is worth, we were able to reproduce the problem as described
above with older Snabb Switch releases and we were also able to verify that
inserting a memory barrier fixes this problem.

This is the relevant commit in the snabbswitch repo for reference:
https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/commit/c33cdd8704246887e11d7c353f773f7b488a47f2

In a nutshell, we added an MFENCE instruction after writing used->idx and
before checking VRING_F_NO_INTERRUPT.

I have not tested this case under DPDK myself and so I am not really
certain which memory barrier operations are sufficient/insufficient in that
context. I hope that our experience is relevant/helpful though and I am
happy to explain more about that if I have missed any important details.

Cheers,
-Luke