Re: [Qemu-devel] backend for blk or fs with guaranteed blocking/synchronous I/O

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 04:24:12PM +0600, Artem Pisarenko wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm developing paravirtualized target linux system which runs multiple linux
> containers (LXC) inside itself. (For those, who unfamiliar with LXC, simply
> put, it's an isolated group of userspace processes with their own rootfs.) Each
> container should be provided access to its rootfs located at host and execution
> of container should be deterministic. Particularly, it means that container I/O
> operations must be synchronized within some predefined quantum of guest
> _virtual_ time, i.e. its I/O activity shouldn't be delayed by host performance
> or activities on host and other containers. In other words, guest should see
> it's like either infinite throughput and zero latency, or some predefined
> throughput/latency characteristics guaranteed per each rootfs.
> 
> While other sources of non-determinism are seem to be eliminated (using TCG,
> -icount, etc.), asynchronous I/O still introduces it.

...

Just that you should realize that the issues are not limited to QEMU: to
get real time behaviour out of a Linux host you need a real-time kernel
and real-time capable hardware/firmware. I'm not an expert on this at
all, but see e.g. these old presentations:
https://lwn.net/Articles/656807/

-- 
MST