Re: QEMU/KVM migration backwards compatibility broken?

Dr. David Alan Gilbert
2019-06-10T09:44:52Z

* Liran Alon (liran.alon@oracle.com) wrote:
>
> > On 6 Jun 2019, at 16:31, Dr. David Alan Gilbert <dgilbert@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >>>
> >>> So we still need to tie subsections to machine types; that way
> >>> you don't send them to old qemu's and there for you don't have the
> >>> problem of the qemu receiving something it doesn't know.
> >>
> >> I agree that if there is no way to skip a VMState subsection in the stream, then we must
> >> have a way to specify to source QEMU to prevent sending this subsection to destination…
> >>
> >> I would suggest though that instead of having a flag tied to machine-type, we will have a QMP command
> >> that can specify names of subsections we explicitly wish to be skipped sending to destination even if their .needed() method returns true.
> >
> > I don't like the thought of generically going behind the devices back;
> > it's pretty rare to have to do this, so adding a qmp command to tweak
> > properties that we've already got seems to make more sense to me.
> >
> >> This seems like a more explicit approach and doesn’t come with the down-side of forever not migrating this VMState subsection
> > Dave
>
> If I understand you correctly, this is what you propose:
> 1) Have a .post_load() method for VMState subsections that depend on kernel capability to fail migration in case capability do not exist.

Yes (wehther it fails or prints a warning depends on how significant the
capability is; if it's a guest crash then fail is probably best).

> 2) For specific problematic VMState subsections, add property such that it’s .needed() method will return false in case the property is set to false (value is true by default).
> 3) Have a QMP command that allows dynamically changing the value of these properties.
> 4) Properties values are still tied to machine-type? I think not right?

Property values are initialised from the machine type; in your case
where you want to upgrade to use a new feature then you can use
(3) to change it.

> I instead propose the following:
> 1) Same as (1) above.
> 2) Add a MigrationParameter (and matching MigrationCapability) named “avoid_state” that specifies list of subsection names to avoid sending in migration even if their .needed() method will return false. i.e. We will modify migration/vmstate.c to not even call .needed() method of such subsection.
>
> I believe the second proposal have the following advantages:
> 1) Less error-prone: .needed() methods are written only once and don’t need to take into account additional properties when calculating if they are required or not. Just depend on guest state.
> 2) Generic: We don’t require additional patch to add a new property to support avoiding sending some subsection in case it doesn’t matter for some workload. As we have discovered only late after msr_smi_count was added (by me) at that point. Second approach allows avoid sending any subsection that is deemed not important to guest workload by migration admin.
> 3) Not tied to machine-type: Properties are usually tied to machine-type as they need to remain same forever for the lifetime of the guest. However, migration parameters are per-migration and are meant to be tweaked and changed. This allows a guest that used to run on old QEMU and moved to new QEMU to now have better state saved for it’s next future migrations.
>
> Currently we indeed have very rare cases like this ([git grep \"x-migrate | wc -l] product only 4 results…) but I’m not sure it’s not only because we haven’t analysed carefully the case of
> restored properties that it’s property depend on kernel capability.
>
> As a start thought, we can start by at least agreeing to implement (1) and consider the property VS MigrationParameter discussion for a later time.
>
> What do you think?

I still don't like exposing a list of migration subsections into an
interface.

Dave

> -Liran
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--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@redhat.com / Manchester, UK