Re: [RFC PATCH v1 1/1] vGPU core driver : to provide common interface for vGPU.

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

On Wed, 2016-02-03 at 09:28 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
> > Actually I have a long puzzle in this area. Definitely libvirt will use UUID to
> > mark a VM. And obviously UUID is not recorded within KVM. Then how does
> > libvirt talk to KVM based on UUID? It could be a good reference to this design.
> 
> libvirt keeps track which qemu instance belongs to which vm.
> qemu also gets started with "-uuid ...", so one can query qemu via
> monitor ("info uuid") to figure what the uuid is.  It is also in the
> smbios tables so the guest can see it in the system information table.
> 
> The uuid is not visible to the kernel though, the kvm kernel driver
> doesn't know what the uuid is (and neither does vfio).  qemu uses file
> handles to talk to both kvm and vfio.  qemu notifies both kvm and vfio
> about anything relevant events (guest address space changes etc) and
> connects file descriptors (eventfd -> irqfd).

I think the original link to using a VM UUID for the vGPU comes from
NVIDIA having a userspace component which might get launched from a udev
event as the vGPU is created or the set of vGPUs within that UUID is
started.  Using the VM UUID then gives them a way to associate that
userspace process with a VM instance.  Maybe it could register with
libvirt for some sort of service provided for the VM, I don't know.

> qemu needs a sysfs node as handle to the vfio device, something
> like /sys/devices/virtual/vgpu/<name>.  <name> can be a uuid if you want
> have it that way, but it could be pretty much anything.  The sysfs node
> will probably show up as-is in the libvirt xml when assign a vgpu to a
> vm.  So the name should be something stable (i.e. when using a uuid as
> name you should better not generate a new one on each boot).

Actually I don't think there's really a persistent naming issue, that's
probably where we diverge from the SR-IOV model.  SR-IOV cannot
dynamically add a new VF, it needs to reset the number of VFs to zero,
then re-allocate all of them up to the new desired count.  That has some
obvious implications.  I think with both vendors here, we can
dynamically allocate new vGPUs, so I would expect that libvirt would
create each vGPU instance as it's needed.  None would be created by
default without user interaction.

Personally I think using a UUID makes sense, but it needs to be
userspace policy whether that UUID has any implicit meaning like
matching the VM UUID.  Having an index within a UUID bothers me a bit,
but it doesn't seem like too much of a concession to enable the use case
that NVIDIA is trying to achieve.  Thanks,

Alex