Disable smartpoll netfront option in Xen flavour? (Was: Re: [Xen-devel] Re: new netfront and occasional receive path lockup)

[Ian Campbell <ijc@hellion.org.uk>]

Bastian,

I think we should pull the changesets which make smart poll optional and
then disable it by default into the squeeze kernel. What do you think?

I presume it is preferred to pull the individual changesets at this
stage rather than rebasing to a newer xen.git? (I can do either if you
like)

Ian.

On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 19:44 +0100, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:54:27AM -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> >  On 09/14/2010 01:25 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 20:36 +0100, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> > >> On 09/13/2010 09:08 AM, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> > >>> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 09:01:57AM -0700, Gerald Turner wrote:
> > >>>> Then I restarted all domUs with use_smartpoll=0 and haven't had any
> > >>>> lockups in 7 hours.
> > >>>>
> > >>> I think we should default xen/stable-2.6.32.x to use_smartpoll=0 for the time being
> > >>> until this is sorted out..
> > >> Agreed.
> > > Should we also consider adding a netback option to disable it for the
> > > system as a whole as well? Or are the issues strictly in-guest only?
> > >
> > > Perhaps netback should support a xenstore key to allow a toolstack to
> > > configure this property per guest?
> > 
> > It depends on what the problem is.  If there's a basic problem with the
> > smartpoll front<->back communication protocol then we'll probably have
> > to revert the whole thing and start over.  If the bug is just something
> > in the frontend then we can disable it there until resolved.
> > 
> > Fortunately I haven't pushed netfront smartpoll support upstream yet, so
> > the userbase is still fairly limited.  I hope.
> > 
> 
> There has been quite a few people on ##xen on irc complaining about it..
> 
> I think the smartpoll code has ended up in Debian Squeeze 2.6.32-5-xen kernel..
> Hopefully they'll pull the "Revert "xen/netfront: default smartpoll to on"" soon..
> 
> -- Pasi
> 

-- 
Ian Campbell
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