Comment 10 for bug 1706296

Peter Maydell <email address hidden> writes:

> On 18 August 2017 at 09:40, Alex Bennée <email address hidden> wrote:
>>
>> John Arbuckle <email address hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Using '-cpu 486' gets past the assertion error. I guess Windows NT 4.0
>>> is not compatible with newer Intel processors.
>>
>> It might be related. The assertion error is caused by the fact an
>> exception has occurred and processor is trying to dump a stack frame that
>> overlaps from RAM into device memory. As the IRQ/exception handling is
>> already under the BQL (as it changes machine state) we get the assertion
>> when it tries to take the BQL a second time when accessing device
>> memory.
>
> This sounds worrying -- lots and lots of target backend code
> does writes to memory. Is it all going to cause assertions if
> it happens to be pointing at a device?

Currently yes.

That said from John's update it sounds very much like a symptom of not
emulating the right processor type rather than behaviour we are
incorrectly modelling. If we invert the lock before writing the stack
page is it just going to crash in a more esoteric way?

I'm not sure how you correctly emulate writing random stack pages to a
random device. Unless there is some sort of weird [un]documented behaviour
we should be doing?

--
Alex Bennée