Re: [Qemu-devel] [libvirt] [PATCH v2 1/4] config: Introduce <migration> for SPICE graphics

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 03:26:49PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 15.09.2012 17:10, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 05:23:16PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> >> [adding qemu]
> >>
> >> On 09/14/2012 11:47 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 07:34:50PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> >>>> With this element users will control how SPICE
> >>>> server behaves upon migration. For now, there's
> >>>> just one attribute 'seamless' turning seamless
> >>>> migration on/off/default.
> >>>
> >>> Ewww, no. This information is a related to a API operation,
> >>> not the VM configuration. It should be either auto-detected
> >>> by libvirt to the best compatible setting, or passed as a
> >>> flag to the virDomainMigrate API call if auto-detection is
> >>> not possible.
> >>
> >> But with the current qemu implementation, there's no way to know if the
> >> destination supports this until after you've started the source, and the
> >> current implementation in qemu is that you must declare the semantics at
> >> the time you start qemu, not at the time you send the 'migrate' monitor
> >> command.  For libvirt autodetection to work without polluting the domain
> >> XML, we'd need to be able to auto-detect at the time we start migration.
> >>
> >> This sounds like we need to enhance the 'migrate-set-capabilities'
> >> command to enable or disable this feature on the fly, according to what
> >> libvirt detects from the remote end, rather than hard-coding it to the
> >> startup state of qemu on the source side.
> > 
> > Hmm, my understanding of the QEMU flag was different. Based on
> > the commit message:
> > 
> >     spice: adding seamless-migration option to the command line
> >     
> >     The seamless-migration flag is required in order to identify
> >     whether libvirt supports the new QEVENT_SPICE_MIGRATE_COMPLETED or not
> >     (by default the flag is off).
> >     New libvirt versions that wait for QEVENT_SPICE_MIGRATE_COMPLETED should turn on this flag.
> >     When this flag is off, spice fallbacks to its old migration method, which
> >     can result in data loss.
> > 
> > 
> > This says to me that any libvirt which knows about the new
> > SPICE_MIGRATE_COMPLETED event, should set the seamless-migration
> > flag unconditionally, to indicate that it can handle the event
> > and thus the new migration method. It says nothing about only
> > setting this flag if the destination QEMU also supports it.
> > As such, IMHO, we can & should set this flag unconditonally
> > on all QEMUs we run which support it.
> > 
> > If it turns out that this flag does indeed require that the
> > destination QEMU also has the same setting, then IMHO this
> > flag is a fatally flawed design. At time of starting any QEMU
> > instance, we can't know whether the destination QEMU we want
> > to migrate to will have the support or not. Compatibility
> > checks of this kind can only be decided at time the migrate
> > command is actually issued.
> > 
> > 
> > Daniel
> > 
> 
> From my investigation I was able to migrate between qemu where one had
> seamless_migration=on and the other one didn't support such argument at
> all. Literally, on source I've checked out 27af778828db9 (the last
> commit in Yonit's patchset) on destination f5bb039c6d97e (the last
> before the patchset). Then I've migrated and receive both event and flag
> set in query-spice response. So I guess the design is okay.

Oh, BTW, when you tested did you have an actual SPICE client connected
and did it migrate ok ?

Daniel
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