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Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC Patch 00/12] IXGBE: Add live migration support for


From: Alexander Duyck
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC Patch 00/12] IXGBE: Add live migration support for SRIOV NIC
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 16:26:47 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.1.0

On 10/21/2015 12:20 PM, Alex Williamson wrote:
On Wed, 2015-10-21 at 21:45 +0300, Or Gerlitz wrote:
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 7:37 PM, Lan Tianyu <address@hidden> wrote:
This patchset is to propose a new solution to add live migration support
for 82599 SRIOV network card.

In our solution, we prefer to put all device specific operation into VF and
PF driver and make code in the Qemu more general.

[...]

Service down time test
So far, we tested migration between two laptops with 82599 nic which
are connected to a gigabit switch. Ping VF in the 0.001s interval
during migration on the host of source side. It service down
time is about 180ms.

So... what would you expect service down wise for the following
solution which is zero touch and I think should work for any VF
driver:

on host A: unplug the VM and conduct live migration to host B ala the
no-SRIOV case.

The trouble here is that the VF needs to be unplugged prior to the start
of migration because we can't do effective dirty page tracking while the
device is connected and doing DMA.  So the downtime, assuming we're
counting only VF connectivity, is dependent on memory size, rate of
dirtying, and network bandwidth; seconds for small guests, minutes or
more (maybe much, much more) for large guests.

The question of dirty page tracking though should be pretty simple. We start the Tx packets out as dirty so we don't need to add anything there. It seems like the Rx data and Tx/Rx descriptor rings are the issue.

This is why the typical VF agnostic approach here is to using bonding
and fail over to a emulated device during migration, so performance
suffers, but downtime is something acceptable.

If we want the ability to defer the VF unplug until just before the
final stages of the migration, we need the VF to participate in dirty
page tracking.  Here it's done via an enlightened guest driver.  Alex
Graf presented a solution using a device specific enlightenment in QEMU.
Otherwise we'd need hardware support from the IOMMU.

My only real complaint with this patch series is that it seems like there was to much focus on instrumenting the driver instead of providing the code necessary to enable a driver ecosystem that enables migration.

I don't know if what we need is a full hardware IOMMU. It seems like a good way to take care of the need to flag dirty pages for DMA capable devices would be to add functionality to the dma_map_ops calls sync_{sg|single}for_cpu and unmap_{page|sg} so that they would take care of mapping the pages as dirty for us when needed. We could probably make do with just a few tweaks to existing API in order to make this work.

As far as the descriptor rings I would argue they are invalid as soon as we migrate. The problem is there is no way to guarantee ordering as we cannot pre-emptively mark an Rx data buffer as being a dirty page when we haven't even looked at the Rx descriptor for the given buffer yet. Tx has similar issues as we cannot guarantee the Tx will disable itself after a complete frame. As such I would say the moment we migrate we should just give up on the frames that are still in the descriptor rings, drop them, and then start over with fresh rings.

- Alex



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