AioContext: force event loop iteration using BH

The notify_me optimization introduced in commit eabc97797310
("AioContext: fix broken ctx->dispatching optimization") skips
event_notifier_set() calls when the event loop thread is not blocked in
ppoll(2).

This optimization causes a deadlock if two aio_context_acquire() calls
race.  notify_me = 0 during the race so the winning thread can enter
ppoll(2) unaware that the other thread is waiting its turn to acquire
the AioContext.

This patch forces ppoll(2) to return by scheduling a BH instead of
calling aio_notify().

The following deadlock with virtio-blk dataplane is fixed:

  qemu ... -object iothread,id=iothread0 \
           -drive if=none,id=drive0,file=test.img,... \
           -device virtio-blk-pci,iothread=iothread0,drive=drive0

This command-line results in a hang early on without this patch.

Thanks to Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> for investigating this bug
with me.

Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Cornelia Huck <cornelia.huck@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Message-id: 1438101249-25166-4-git-send-email-pbonzini@redhat.com
Message-Id: <1438014819-18125-3-git-send-email-stefanha@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/async.c b/async.c
index 8d23681526..efce14b63a 100644
--- a/async.c
+++ b/async.c
@@ -79,8 +79,10 @@ int aio_bh_poll(AioContext *ctx)
          * aio_notify again if necessary.
          */
         if (!bh->deleted && atomic_xchg(&bh->scheduled, 0)) {
-            if (!bh->idle)
+            /* Idle BHs and the notify BH don't count as progress */
+            if (!bh->idle && bh != ctx->notify_dummy_bh) {
                 ret = 1;
+            }
             bh->idle = 0;
             bh->cb(bh->opaque);
         }
@@ -230,6 +232,7 @@ aio_ctx_finalize(GSource     *source)
 {
     AioContext *ctx = (AioContext *) source;
 
+    qemu_bh_delete(ctx->notify_dummy_bh);
     thread_pool_free(ctx->thread_pool);
 
     qemu_mutex_lock(&ctx->bh_lock);
@@ -298,8 +301,15 @@ static void aio_timerlist_notify(void *opaque)
 
 static void aio_rfifolock_cb(void *opaque)
 {
+    AioContext *ctx = opaque;
+
     /* Kick owner thread in case they are blocked in aio_poll() */
-    aio_notify(opaque);
+    qemu_bh_schedule(ctx->notify_dummy_bh);
+}
+
+static void notify_dummy_bh(void *opaque)
+{
+    /* Do nothing, we were invoked just to force the event loop to iterate */
 }
 
 static void event_notifier_dummy_cb(EventNotifier *e)
@@ -326,6 +336,8 @@ AioContext *aio_context_new(Error **errp)
     rfifolock_init(&ctx->lock, aio_rfifolock_cb, ctx);
     timerlistgroup_init(&ctx->tlg, aio_timerlist_notify, ctx);
 
+    ctx->notify_dummy_bh = aio_bh_new(ctx, notify_dummy_bh, NULL);
+
     return ctx;
 }