From: Bin Guo <guobin@linux.alibaba.com>
To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
Cc: peterx@redhat.com, farosas@suse.de, pierrick.bouvier@oss.qualcomm.com
Subject: [PATCH 1/2] docs/migration: document that postcopy can be used with multifd
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:37:18 +0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20260915063719.89031-2-guobin@linux.alibaba.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20260915063719.89031-1-guobin@linux.alibaba.com>
Since commit e27418861288 ("migration: enable multifd and postcopy
together") in the 10.1 release, the multifd and postcopy-ram capabilities
are no longer mutually exclusive, but the postcopy documentation does not
mention multifd at all, leaving users unaware that the two features can be
combined.
Add a short section describing how they interact: multifd carries the
pages of the precopy phase, the channels are flushed and synced before the
switchover (because loading a page in a multifd receive thread is not
atomic with regard to a running vCPU), and the postcopy phase itself does
not use the multifd channels.
Signed-off-by: Bin Guo <guobin@linux.alibaba.com>
---
docs/devel/migration/postcopy.rst | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 26 insertions(+)
diff --git a/docs/devel/migration/postcopy.rst b/docs/devel/migration/postcopy.rst
index e319388d8f..570a3a1ce6 100644
--- a/docs/devel/migration/postcopy.rst
+++ b/docs/devel/migration/postcopy.rst
@@ -294,6 +294,32 @@ the background migration channel. Anyone who cares about latencies of page
faults during a postcopy migration should enable this feature. By default,
it's not enabled.
+Postcopy with multifd
+---------------------
+
+The ``multifd`` capability can be enabled together with ``postcopy-ram``
+since the 10.1 QEMU release. The two features apply to different phases of
+the migration:
+
+ - During the precopy phase, guest pages are sent over the multifd channels
+ as usual, so the initial RAM transfer can use all of them.
+
+ - Just before switching to postcopy, the source flushes and syncs the
+ multifd channels. This guarantees that all the pages already queued on
+ those channels are loaded on the destination *before* the destination
+ CPUs are started, which is required because loading a page in a multifd
+ receive thread is not atomic with regard to a running vCPU.
+
+ - During the postcopy phase the multifd channels are no longer used for
+ guest pages. Both the background stream and the pages requested by the
+ destination go through the background migration channel instead, or
+ through the preempt channel for the requested pages when postcopy
+ preemption is enabled.
+
+Consequently, multifd only speeds up the precopy phase of a postcopy
+migration. The bandwidth available once postcopy has started is the same as
+without multifd.
+
Postcopy blocktime statistics
-----------------------------
--
2.50.1 (Apple Git-155)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2026-09-15 6:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-09-15 6:37 [PATCH 0/2] migration/postcopy: shared-fault accounting and multifd docs Bin Guo
2026-09-15 6:37 ` Bin Guo [this message]
2026-09-22 14:44 ` [PATCH 1/2] docs/migration: document that postcopy can be used with multifd Fabiano Rosas
2026-09-22 17:29 ` Peter Xu
2026-09-15 6:37 ` [PATCH 2/2] migration/postcopy: account faults taken by memory sharing processes Bin Guo
2026-09-22 17:55 ` Peter Xu
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