Re: FreeBSD on xen hvm

From: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:30:17 +0100 (BST)
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Andrew Turner wrote:

> 1) PREEMPTION Preemption causes the kernel to panic with a page fault. The 
> dmesg is available from [1].

Any chance it's possible to get a core for this, or attach GDB somehow to the 
VM?  It looks like timing in Xen may be exposing a race in some or another 
subsystem with timers, but figuring out which subsystem it is will be most 
easily done if we can inspect the callout information, which is most easily 
done with GDB since you can inspect the callout structure more easily.  If 
not, then we can add some printfs to extract the information, I expect, or 
extend DDB.  We need to find out what the function pointer in the callout 
structure is for.

> 3) INVARIANTS Invariants causes a panic from a page fault. See [2] for the 
> dmesg and backtrace.

This appears to be in the start up of Audit as it creates a kernel thread. 
Possibly it's creating the thread too early, or possibly something else is 
going on.  Can you try creating a kernel without options AUDIT and see if it 
works better, or if it just panics when the next thread is created?

It sounds like Xen may start the timer firing sooner than on plain hardware, 
or possibly at a faster rate initially, and that's causing things to happen in 
a different order, so I expect we'll either bump into a series of races of 
this sort based on different ordering of events, or discover the timer isn't 
properly being disabled or managed in Xen :-).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge

>
> I can provide people with more information to track down the problem
> and try patches.
>
> Andrew
>
> [1] http://fubar.geek.nz/files/freebsd/xen/xen_crash_preemption.txt
> [2] http://fubar.geek.nz/files/freebsd/xen/xen_crash_invariants.txt
>
> -- 
> Andrew Turner
> http://fubar.geek.nz/blog/
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Received on Fri Aug 24 2007 - 10:30:18 UTC

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