docs: Expand documentation for the tickpolicy timer attribute

The current documentation is fairly terse and not easy to decode
for someone who's not intimately familiar with the inner workings
of timer devices. Expand on it by providing a somewhat verbose
description of what behavior each policy will result in, as seen
from both the guest OS and host point of view.

This is lifted directly from QEMU commit

  commit 2a7d957596786404c4ed16b089273de95a9580ad
  Author: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com>
  Date:   Tue Feb 11 19:37:44 2020 +0100

    qapi: Expand documentation for LostTickPolicy

  v4.2.0-1442-g2a7d957596

The original text also matched word for word the documentation
found in QEMU.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
This commit is contained in:
Andrea Bolognani 2020-02-18 21:43:08 +01:00
parent 6d371d92f8
commit 2f06757048

View File

@ -2487,26 +2487,36 @@
<p>
The <code>tickpolicy</code> attribute determines what
happens when QEMU misses a deadline for injecting a
tick to the guest:
tick to the guest. This can happen, for example, because the
guest was paused.
</p>
<dl>
<dt><code>delay</code></dt>
<dd>Continue to deliver ticks at the normal rate.
The guest time will be delayed due to the late
tick</dd>
<dd>Continue to deliver ticks at the normal rate. The guest OS
will not notice anything is amiss, as from its point of view
time will have continued to flow normally. The time in the
guest should now be behind the time in the host by exactly
the amount of time during which ticks have been missed.</dd>
<dt><code>catchup</code></dt>
<dd>Deliver ticks at a higher rate to catch up
with the missed tick. The guest time should
not be delayed once catchup is complete.</dd>
<dd>Deliver ticks at a higher rate to catch up with the missed
ticks. The guest OS will not notice anything is amiss, as
from its point of view time will have continued to flow
normally. Once the timer has managed to catch up with all
the missing ticks, the time in the guest and in the host
should match.</dd>
<dt><code>merge</code></dt>
<dd>Merge the missed tick(s) into one tick and
inject. The guest time may be delayed, depending
on how the OS reacts to the merging of ticks</dd>
<dt><code>discard</code></dt>
<dd>Throw away the missed tick(s) and continue
with future injection normally. The guest time
may be delayed, unless the OS has explicit
handling of lost ticks</dd>
<dd>Throw away the missed ticks and continue with future
injection normally. The guest OS will see the timer jump
ahead by a potentially quite significant amount all at once,
as if the intervening chunk of time had simply not existed;
needless to say, such a sudden jump can easily confuse a
guest OS which is not specifically prepared to deal with it.
Assuming the guest OS can deal correctly with the time jump,
the time in the guest and in the host should now match.</dd>
</dl>
<p>If the policy is "catchup", there can be further details in
the <code>catchup</code> sub-element.</p>