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[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH v5 4/5] Inter-VM shared memory PCI device


From: Anthony Liguori
Subject: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH v5 4/5] Inter-VM shared memory PCI device
Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 11:52:13 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091209 Fedora/3.0-4.fc12 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0

On 05/10/2010 11:20 AM, Cam Macdonell wrote:
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Anthony Liguori<address@hidden>  wrote:
On 05/10/2010 10:28 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
On 05/10/2010 06:22 PM, Cam Macdonell wrote:
+
+    /* if the position is -1, then it's shared memory region fd */
+    if (incoming_posn == -1) {
+
+        s->num_eventfds = 0;
+
+        if (check_shm_size(s, incoming_fd) == -1) {
+            exit(-1);
+        }
+
+        /* creating a BAR in qemu_chr callback may be crazy */
+        create_shared_memory_BAR(s, incoming_fd);

It probably is... why can't you create it during initialization?
This is for the shared memory server implementation, so the fd for the
shared memory has to be received (over the qemu char device) from the
server before the BAR can be created via qemu_ram_mmap() which adds
the necessary memory


We could do the handshake during initialization.  I'm worried that the
device will appear without the BAR, and strange things will happen.  But the
chardev API is probably not geared for passing data during init.

Anthony, any ideas?
Why can't we create the BAR with just normal RAM and then change it to a
mmap()'d fd after initialization?  This will be behavior would be important
for live migration as it would let you quickly migrate preserving the memory
contents without waiting for an external program to reconnect.

Regards,

Anthony Lioguori

Otherwise, if the BAR is allocated during initialization, I would have
to use MAP_FIXED to mmap the memory.  This is what I did before the
qemu_ram_mmap() function was added.
What would happen to any data written to the BAR before the the handshake
completed?  I think it would disappear.
You don't have to do MAP_FIXED.  You can allocate a ram area and map that in
when disconnected.  When you connect, you create another ram area and
memcpy() the previous ram area to the new one.  You then map the second ram
area in.
the memcpy() would overwrite the contents of the shared memory each
time a guest joins which would be dangerous.

I think those are reasonable semantics and is really the only way to get guest-transparent reconnect. The later is pretty critical for guest transparent live migration.

 From the guest's perspective, it's totally transparent.  For the backend,
I'd suggest having an explicit "initialized" ack or something so that it
knows that the data is now mapped to the guest.
Yes, I think the ack is the way to go, so the guest has to be aware of
it.  Would setting a flag in the driver-specific config space be an
acceptable ack that the shared region is now mapped?

You know it's mapped because it's mapped when the pci map function returns. You don't need the guest to explicitly tell you.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

Cam




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