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The introduction of parallel event queues added most of the support
needed to run multiple VMs (systems) within the same gem5
instance. This changeset fixes up signal delivery so that KVM's
control signals are delivered to the thread that executes the CPU's
event queue. Specifically:
* Timers and counters are now initialized from a separate method
(startupThread) that is scheduled as the first event in the
thread-specific event queue. This ensures that they are
initialized from the thread that is going to execute the CPUs
event queue and enables signal delivery to the right thread when
exiting from KVM.
* The POSIX-timer-based KVM timer (used to force exits from KVM) has
been updated to deliver signals to the thread that's executing KVM
instead of the process (thread is undefined in that case). This
assumes that the timer is instantiated from the thread that is
going to execute the KVM vCPU.
* Signal masking is now done using pthread_sigmask instead of
sigprocmask. The behavior of the latter is undefined in threaded
applications.
* Since signal masks can be inherited, make sure to actively unmask
the control signals when setting up the KVM signal mask.
There are currently no facilities to multiplex between multiple KVM
CPUs in the same event queue, we are therefore limited to
configurations where there is only one KVM CPU per event queue. In
practice, this means that multi-system configurations can be
simulated, but not multiple CPUs in a shared-memory configuration.
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There is a possibility that the timespec used to arm a timer becomes
zero if the number of ticks used when arming a timer is close to the
resolution of the timer. Due to the semantics of POSIX timers, this
actually disarms the timer. This changeset fixes this issue by
eliminating the rounding error (we always round away from zero
now). It also reuses the minimum number of cycles, which were
previously only used for cycle-based timers, to calculate a more
useful resolution.
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timer_create can apparently return -1 and set errno to EAGAIN if the
kernel suffered a temporary failure when allocating a timer. This
happens from time to time, so we need to handle it.
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Add support for using the CPU cycle counter instead of a normal POSIX
timer to generate timed exits to gem5. This should, in theory, provide
better resolution when requesting timer signals.
The perf-based timer requires a fairly recent kernel since it requires
a working PERF_EVENT_IOC_PERIOD ioctl. This ioctl has existed in the
kernel for a long time, but it used to be completely broken due to an
inverted match when the kernel copied things from user
space. Additionally, the ioctl does not change the sample period
correctly on all kernel versions which implement it. It is currently
only known to work reliably on kernel version 3.7 and above on ARM.
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This changeset introduces the architecture independent parts required
to support KVM-accelerated CPUs. It introduces two new simulation
objects:
KvmVM -- The KVM VM is a component shared between all CPUs in a shared
memory domain. It is typically instantiated as a child of the
system object in the simulation hierarchy. It provides access
to KVM VM specific interfaces.
BaseKvmCPU -- Abstract base class for all KVM-based CPUs. Architecture
dependent CPU implementations inherit from this class
and implement the following methods:
* updateKvmState() -- Update the
architecture-dependent KVM state from the gem5
thread context associated with the CPU.
* updateThreadContext() -- Update the thread context
from the architecture-dependent KVM state.
* dump() -- Dump the KVM state using (optional).
In order to deliver interrupts to the guest, CPU
implementations typically override the tick() method and
check for, and deliver, interrupts prior to entering
KVM.
Hardware-virutalized CPU currently have the following limitations:
* SE mode is not supported.
* PC events are not supported.
* Timing statistics are currently very limited. The current approach
simply scales the host cycles with a user-configurable factor.
* The simulated system must not contain any caches.
* Since cycle counts are approximate, there is no way to request an
exact number of cycles (or instructions) to be executed by the CPU.
* Hardware virtualized CPUs and gem5 CPUs must not execute at the
same time in the same simulator instance.
* Only single-CPU systems can be simulated.
* Remote GDB connections to the guest system are not supported.
Additionally, m5ops requires an architecture specific interface and
might not be supported.
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