KVM: arm/arm64: Fix arch timers with userspace irqchips

When introducing support for irqchip in userspace we needed a way to
mask the timer signal to prevent the guest continuously exiting due to a
screaming timer.

We did this by disabling the corresponding percpu interrupt on the
host interrupt controller, because we cannot rely on the host system
having a GIC, and therefore cannot make any assumptions about having an
active state to hide the timer signal.

Unfortunately, when introducing this feature, it became entirely
possible that a VCPU which belongs to a VM that has a userspace irqchip
can disable the vtimer irq on the host on some physical CPU, and then go
away without ever enabling the vtimer irq on that physical CPU again.

This means that using irqchips in userspace on a system that also
supports running VMs with an in-kernel GIC can prevent forward progress
from in-kernel GIC VMs.

Later on, when we started taking virtual timer interrupts in the arch
timer code, we would also leave this timer state active for userspace
irqchip VMs, because we leave it up to a VGIC-enabled guest to
deactivate the hardware IRQ using the HW bit in the LR.

Both issues are solved by only using the enable/disable trick on systems
that do not have a host GIC which supports the active state, because all
VMs on such systems must use irqchips in userspace.  Systems that have a
working GIC with support for an active state use the active state to
mask the timer signal for both userspace and in-kernel irqchips.

Cc: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier@arm.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # v4.12+
Fixes: d9e139778376 ("KVM: arm/arm64: Support arch timers with a userspace gic")
Signed-off-by: Christoffer Dall <christoffer.dall@linaro.org>
1 file changed