When a vCPU is HLTed, interrupts with a priority below the processor
priority (PPR) should not resume the vCPU while interrupts at or above
the PPR should. With posted interrupts, bhyve maintains a bitmap of
pending interrupts in PIR descriptor along with a single 'pending'
bit. This bit is checked by a CPU running in guest mode at various
places to determine if it should be checked. In addition, another CPU
can force a CPU in guest mode to check for pending interrupts by
sending an IPI to a special IDT vector reserved for this purpose.
bhyve had a bug in that it would only notify a guest vCPU of an
interrupt (e.g. by sending the special IPI or by resuming it if it was
idle due to HLT) if an interrupt arrived that was higher priority than
PPR and no interrupts were currently pending. This assumed that if
the 'pending' bit was set, any needed notification was already in
progress. However, if the first interrupt sent to a HLTed vCPU was
lower priority than PPR and the second was higher than PPR, the first
interrupt would set 'pending' but not notify the vCPU, and the second
interrupt would not notify the vCPU because 'pending' was already set.
To fix this, track the priority of pending interrupts in a separate
per-vCPU bitmask and notify a vCPU anytime an interrupt arrives that
is above PPR and higher than any previously-received interrupt.
This was found and debugged in the bhyve port to SmartOS maintained by
Joyent. Relevant SmartOS bugs with more background:
https://smartos.org/bugview/OS-6829https://smartos.org/bugview/OS-6930https://smartos.org/bugview/OS-7354
Submitted by: Patrick Mooney <pmooney@pfmooney.com>
Reviewed by: tychon, rgrimes
Obtained from: SmartOS / Joyent
MFC after: 2 weeks
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D19299
49cf19e56b