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* [PATCH v5 00/11] migration: fast snapshot load
@ 2026-08-16 17:46 Aadeshveer Singh
  2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 01/11] migration: Propagate error in postcopy setup functions Aadeshveer Singh
                   ` (11 more replies)
  0 siblings, 12 replies; 13+ messages in thread
From: Aadeshveer Singh @ 2026-08-16 17:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: qemu-devel
  Cc: peterx, farosas, pbonzini, philmd, lvivier, ayoub,
	pierrick.bouvier, Aadeshveer Singh

This series implements a "fast snapshot load" mechanism to
significantly reduce the perceived resume time of a VM from a snapshot
file.

Currently, resuming a VM from a snapshot file requires loading all RAM
pages into the QEMU instance before execution begins. This extension
allows the user to run the VM nearly instantly by loading only the
required device states up front and loading RAM pages lazily, by
trapping access to pages that have not yet been loaded.

Using the Linux userfaultfd syscall, a fault thread catches all page
faults caused by the guest and loads in the pages required to keep
the VM running. Concurrently, an eager background thread iteratively
loads all remaining pages into RAM so the guest does not have to
depend on the fault thread indefinitely.

Much of code is reused from postcopy for fault handling and precopy
for reading mapped ram file. Implementation revolves around two
threads named the fault thread and eager load thread. Fault thread as
name suggests catches page faults by the guest and serves them using
userfaultfd. Postcopy fault thread is reused but instead of requesting
source for a page it loads the page directly by reading from file. In
order to remove the dependency of guest on fault thread indefinitely
the eager load thread loads in the entire RAM sequentially, and after
iterating through the entire RAM signals fault thread to exit and
calls cleanup.

In order to prevent the case of a page being loaded twice(in the
case when eager load thread is loading it and fault thread also
tries to serve fault on same page) a bitmap called pending_bmap is
used to track pages which are pending and not being loaded by any
thread. Atomic operations on this bitmap allows coordination between
threads to prevent any unwanted behaviours

This patch series was tested on a single machine:
host OS   : Fedora 44
host RAM  : 32GB DDR5(4KB pagesize)
host CPU  : Intel Ultra9 185H(22 cores, x86_64)

Guests tested:
- KVM enabled
  guest OS  : Fedora 44
  guest RAM : 16GB(4KB pagesize)
  guest CPU : 4 cores(x86_64)
- host using 2MB hugepages
  guest OS  : Debian 13
  guest RAM : 16GB(16KB pagesize)
  guest CPU : 4 cores(x86_64)

Future direction:
- Add support for multifd
- Add support for vhost-user

---
v4 -> v5
- Modify pending_bmap(Patch 6) to use variable size for better
  efficient atomic state management
- Added a comment(Patch 7) explaining postcopy_mapped_ram_load_page
  explaining why cases where guest page is larger than host page are
  disabled following what remote postcopy follows
- Add a new check(Patch 9) in migrate_prepare to bail out if migrate
  was used with fast snapshot load enabled, as suggested by Peter


Aadeshveer Singh (11):
  migration: Propagate error in postcopy setup functions
  migration: Extract blocktime marking helper
  migration: Rename postcopy_listen_thread_bh
  migration: Use file_bmap for RAMBlock during incoming file load
  migration: Make qemu_get_buffer_at() thread-safe
  migration: add RAMBlock field and helper for fast snapshot load
  migration: add support for fault thread to load pages from disk
  migration: add eager load thread and setup for fast snapshot load
  migration: update capability conflict test for postcopy-ram+mapped-ram
  migration/tests: Add test for fast snapshot load
  docs/migration: Add documentation for fast snapshot load feature

 docs/devel/migration/fast-snapshot-load.rst |  82 +++++
 docs/devel/migration/features.rst           |   1 +
 include/qemu/notify.h                       |   2 +
 include/system/ramblock.h                   |   6 +
 migration/migration.c                       |  66 ++--
 migration/migration.h                       |   5 +
 migration/options.c                         |  20 +-
 migration/postcopy-ram.c                    | 333 +++++++++++++++++---
 migration/postcopy-ram.h                    |   8 +-
 migration/qemu-file.c                       |  11 +-
 migration/qemu-file.h                       |   4 +-
 migration/ram.c                             | 101 +++++-
 migration/savevm.c                          |  16 +
 migration/savevm.h                          |   2 +
 migration/trace-events                      |   2 +
 tests/qtest/migration/file-tests.c          |  24 ++
 tests/qtest/migration/misc-tests.c          |  52 ---
 util/notify.c                               |   5 +
 18 files changed, 597 insertions(+), 143 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 docs/devel/migration/fast-snapshot-load.rst

-- 
2.55.0



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 13+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2026-08-18 17:46 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2026-08-16 17:46 [PATCH v5 00/11] migration: fast snapshot load Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 01/11] migration: Propagate error in postcopy setup functions Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 02/11] migration: Extract blocktime marking helper Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 03/11] migration: Rename postcopy_listen_thread_bh Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 04/11] migration: Use file_bmap for RAMBlock during incoming file load Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 05/11] migration: Make qemu_get_buffer_at() thread-safe Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 06/11] migration: add RAMBlock field and helper for fast snapshot load Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 07/11] migration: add support for fault thread to load pages from disk Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 08/11] migration: add eager load thread and setup for fast snapshot load Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 09/11] migration: update capability conflict test for postcopy-ram+mapped-ram Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 10/11] migration/tests: Add test for fast snapshot load Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-16 17:46 ` [PATCH v5 11/11] docs/migration: Add documentation for fast snapshot load feature Aadeshveer Singh
2026-08-18 17:45 ` [PATCH v5 00/11] migration: fast snapshot load Peter Xu

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