From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from lindbergh.monkeyblade.net ([23.128.96.19]:39554 "EHLO lindbergh.monkeyblade.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1727961AbgKTVS3 (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Nov 2020 16:18:29 -0500 Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] drivers/virt: vmgenid: add vm generation id driver References: <3E05451B-A9CD-4719-99D0-72750A304044@amazon.com> <300d4404-3efe-880e-ef30-692eabbff5f7@de.ibm.com> <20201119173800.GD8537@kernel.org> <1cdb6fac-0d50-3399-74a6-24c119ebbaa5@amazon.de> From: Dmitry Safonov <0x7f454c46@gmail.com> Message-ID: <106f56ca-49bc-7cad-480f-4b26656e90ce@gmail.com> Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:18:23 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <1cdb6fac-0d50-3399-74a6-24c119ebbaa5@amazon.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit List-ID: To: Alexander Graf Cc: Mike Rapoport , Christian Borntraeger , "Catangiu, Adrian Costin" , "Jason A. Donenfeld" , Jann Horn , Willy Tarreau , "MacCarthaigh, Colm" , Andy Lutomirski , "Theodore Y. Ts'o" , Eric Biggers , "open list:DOCUMENTATION" , kernel list , "Woodhouse, David" , "bonzini@gnu.org" , "Singh, Balbir" , "Weiss, Radu" , "oridgar@gmail.com" , "ghammer@redhat.com" , Jonathan Corbet , Greg Kroah-Hartman , "Michael S. Tsirkin" , Qemu Developers , KVM list , Michal Hocko , "Rafael J. Wysocki" , Pavel Machek , Linux API , "mpe@ellerman.id.au" , linux-s390 , "areber@redhat.com" , Pavel Emelyanov , Andrey Vagin , Pavel Tikhomirov , "gil@azul.com" , "asmehra@redhat.com" , "dgunigun@redhat.com" , "vijaysun@ca.ibm.com" , "Eric W. Biederman" Adrian Reber Hello, +Cc Eric, Adrian On 11/19/20 6:36 PM, Alexander Graf wrote: > On 19.11.20 18:38, Mike Rapoport wrote: >> On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 01:51:18PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote: >>> On 19.11.20 13:02, Christian Borntraeger wrote: >>>> On 16.11.20 16:34, Catangiu, Adrian Costin wrote: >>>>> - Background >>>>> >>>>> The VM Generation ID is a feature defined by Microsoft (paper: >>>>> http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260709) and supported by >>>>> multiple hypervisor vendors. >>>>> >>>>> The feature is required in virtualized environments by apps that work >>>>> with local copies/caches of world-unique data such as random values, >>>>> uuids, monotonically increasing counters, etc. >>>>> Such apps can be negatively affected by VM snapshotting when the VM >>>>> is either cloned or returned to an earlier point in time. >>>>> >>>>> The VM Generation ID is a simple concept meant to alleviate the issue >>>>> by providing a unique ID that changes each time the VM is restored >>>>> from a snapshot. The hw provided UUID value can be used to >>>>> differentiate between VMs or different generations of the same VM. >>>>> >>>>> - Problem >>>>> >>>>> The VM Generation ID is exposed through an ACPI device by multiple >>>>> hypervisor vendors but neither the vendors or upstream Linux have no >>>>> default driver for it leaving users to fend for themselves. [..] >>> The only piece where I'm unsure is how this will interact with CRIU. >> >> To C/R applications that use /dev/vmgenid CRIU need to be aware of it. >> Checkpointing and restoring withing the same "VM generation" shouldn't be >> a problem, but IMHO, making restore work after genid bump could be >> challenging. >> >> Alex, what scenario involving CRIU did you have in mind? > > You can in theory run into the same situation with containers that this > patch is solving for virtual machines. You could for example do a > snapshot of a prewarmed Java runtime with CRIU to get full JIT speeds > starting from the first request. > > That however means you run into the problem of predictable randomness > again. > >> >>> Can containers emulate ioctls and device nodes? >> >> Containers do not emulate ioctls but they can have /dev/vmgenid inside >> the container, so applications can use it the same way as outside the >> container. > > Hm. I suppose we could add a CAP_ADMIN ioctl interface to /dev/vmgenid > (when container people get to the point of needing it) that sets the > generation to "at least X". That way on restore, you could just call > that with "generation at snapshot"+1. > > That also means we need to have this interface available without virtual > machines then though, right? Sounds like a good idea. I guess, genvmid can be global on host, rather than per-userns or per-process for simplicity. Later if somebody will have a bottleneck on restore when every process on the machine wakes up from read() it could be virtualized, but doing it now sounds too early. ioctl() probably should go under checkpoint_restore_ns_capable(current_user_ns()), rather than CAP_SYS_ADMIN (I believe it should be safe from DOS as only CRIU should run with this capability, but worth to document this). Thanks, Dmitry