Re: [Qemu-devel] live migration vs device assignment (motivation)

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Yang Zhang (address@hidden) wrote:
> On 2015/12/10 18:18, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> >* Lan, Tianyu (address@hidden) wrote:
> >>On 12/8/2015 12:50 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >>>I thought about what this is doing at the high level, and I do have some
> >>>value in what you are trying to do, but I also think we need to clarify
> >>>the motivation a bit more.  What you are saying is not really what the
> >>>patches are doing.
> >>>
> >>>And with that clearer understanding of the motivation in mind (assuming
> >>>it actually captures a real need), I would also like to suggest some
> >>>changes.
> >>
> >>Motivation:
> >>Most current solutions for migration with passthough device are based on
> >>the PCI hotplug but it has side affect and can't work for all device.
> >>
> >>For NIC device:
> >>PCI hotplug solution can work around Network device migration
> >>via switching VF and PF.
> >>
> >>But switching network interface will introduce service down time.
> >>
> >>I tested the service down time via putting VF and PV interface
> >>into a bonded interface and ping the bonded interface during plug
> >>and unplug VF.
> >>1) About 100ms when add VF
> >>2) About 30ms when del VF
> >>
> >>It also requires guest to do switch configuration. These are hard to
> >>manage and deploy from our customers. To maintain PV performance during
> >>migration, host side also needs to assign a VF to PV device. This
> >>affects scalability.
> >>
> >>These factors block SRIOV NIC passthough usage in the cloud service and
> >>OPNFV which require network high performance and stability a lot.
> >
> >Right, that I'll agree it's hard to do migration of a VM which uses
> >an SRIOV device; and while I think it should be possible to bond a virtio 
> >device
> >to a VF for networking and then hotplug the SR-IOV device I agree it's hard 
> >to manage.
> >
> >>For other kind of devices, it's hard to work.
> >>We are also adding migration support for QAT(QuickAssist Technology) device.
> >>
> >>QAT device user case introduction.
> >>Server, networking, big data, and storage applications use QuickAssist
> >>Technology to offload servers from handling compute-intensive operations,
> >>such as:
> >>1) Symmetric cryptography functions including cipher operations and
> >>authentication operations
> >>2) Public key functions including RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve
> >>cryptography
> >>3) Compression and decompression functions including DEFLATE and LZS
> >>
> >>PCI hotplug will not work for such devices during migration and these
> >>operations will fail when unplug device.
> >
> >I don't understand that QAT argument; if the device is purely an offload
> >engine for performance, then why can't you fall back to doing the
> >same operations in the VM or in QEMU if the card is unavailable?
> >The tricky bit is dealing with outstanding operations.
> >
> >>So we are trying implementing a new solution which really migrates
> >>device state to target machine and won't affect user during migration
> >>with low service down time.
> >
> >Right, that's a good aim - the only question is how to do it.
> >
> >It looks like this is always going to need some device-specific code;
> >the question I see is whether that's in:
> >     1) qemu
> >     2) the host kernel
> >     3) the guest kernel driver
> >
> >The objections to this series seem to be that it needs changes to (3);
> >I can see the worry that the guest kernel driver might not get a chance
> >to run during the right time in migration and it's painful having to
> >change every guest driver (although your change is small).
> >
> >My question is what stage of the migration process do you expect to tell
> >the guest kernel driver to do this?
> >
> >     If you do it at the start of the migration, and quiesce the device,
> >     the migration might take a long time (say 30 minutes) - are you
> >     intending the device to be quiesced for this long? And where are
> >     you going to send the traffic?
> >     If you are, then do you need to do it via this PCI trick, or could
> >     you just do it via something higher level to quiesce the device.
> >
> >     Or are you intending to do it just near the end of the migration?
> >     But then how do we know how long it will take the guest driver to
> >     respond?
> 
> Ideally, it is able to leave guest driver unmodified but it requires the
> hypervisor or qemu to aware the device which means we may need a driver in
> hypervisor or qemu to handle the device on behalf of guest driver.

Can you answer the question of when do you use your code -
   at the start of migration or
   just before the end?

> >It would be great if we could avoid changing the guest; but at least your 
> >guest
> >driver changes don't actually seem to be that hardware specific; could your
> >changes actually be moved to generic PCI level so they could be made
> >to work for lots of drivers?
> 
> It is impossible to use one common solution for all devices unless the PCIE
> spec documents it clearly and i think one day it will be there. But before
> that, we need some workarounds on guest driver to make it work even it looks
> ugly.

Dave

> 
> -- 
> best regards
> yang
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK