[vbox-dev] Driver ISR call delayed for device interrupts

[llyzs]

Hi Michal & Ram,

Thanks for you prompt response, in fact it has been very helpful.

You were right that the suspicious delay at every 500ms was not in
VirtualBox. I have identified that this was something else I was running on
the host that caused it, so sorry for the confusion.

I am on stable 5.0 source. The way I measure the interrupt is to record the
timestamp (QueryPerformanceCounter) when I call PDMDevHlpPCISetIrq to raise
the interrupt level, and another timestamp when the driver sends another
I/O to lower the interrupt in driver's ISR, then compare the two, so I
think this should be precise. And I log the ones that only exceed 1ms.

So after I fixed my own problem, the ISR delay is now mostly below 10ms,
which is acceptable for me. I am certainly not expecting real-time response
from a VM. :) For completeness, I also tried with the latest 5.1 source
from SVN. And you were right again that there was noticeable improvement
there. The delay is not 100% eliminated (of course) but it happens much
less frequent and the delay tends to be much shorter, mostly 1-3ms.

Thanks again.

Vic

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 3:50 PM Michal Necasek <michal.necasek at oracle.com>
wrote:

>
>      Hi Vic,
>
>   It probably does not hurt to state that if you require real-time
> responsiveness, you should *not* be using a VM. There are no latency
> guarantees.
>
>   You forgot to mention the most relevant fact... which svn revision of
> the OSE source code are you actually using? In fact you expect any kind
> of technical support, you might as well start by providing a VBox.log
> because all the information is in there.
>
>   How exactly do you measure the delay? I assume it's from the device
> calling PDMDevHlpPCISetIrq to the guest accessing some device register
> in the ISR?
>
>   There might be problems specific to Windows 8.1(?) hosts. If you could
> repeat the test on a different host OS (ideally not Windows), that might
> provide some hints.
>
>   I don't know of anything in particular that would happen every 500 ms
> in VirtualBox, but it doesn't have to be the VM, it could be the host
> doing something as well.
>
>
>       Regards,
>         Michal
>
>
> On 6/15/2016 8:51 AM, llyzs wrote:
> > Hi Devs,
> >
> > I have a virtual PCI device added on VirtualBox OSE and a driver which
> > sends I/O to do some stuff in the host and receive interrupts when the
> > work is done. The interrupts work most of the time, however there are
> > random delays between PDMDevHlpPCISetIrq is called and the driver ISR is
> > called. Most of the time there is no delay (<1ms) but periodically there
> > is a delay from 10+ms to even 60+ms. One more strange thing is that the
> > delay mostly happen at exactly every 500ms. So anyone can give me some
> > hint on what is causing the interrupt delay? What kind of job inside
> > VirtualBox that runs every 500ms that might be causing interrupt delay?
> >
> > I am on Windows 8.1 x64 (both guest and host). Thanks in advanced.
> >
> > Vic
> >
> >
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> >
>
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