[Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH 01/14] docs: block replication's description

[Wen Congyang <wency@cn.fujitsu.com>]

Signed-off-by: Wen Congyang <wency@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Yang Hongyang <yanghy@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: zhanghailiang <zhang.zhanghailiang@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Gonglei <arei.gonglei@huawei.com>
---
 docs/block-replication.txt | 129 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 129 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 docs/block-replication.txt

diff --git a/docs/block-replication.txt b/docs/block-replication.txt
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+Block replication
+----------------------------------------
+Copyright Fujitsu, Corp. 2015
+Copyright (c) 2015 Intel Corporation
+Copyright (c) 2015 HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO.,LTD.
+
+This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2 or later.
+See the COPYING file in the top-level directory.
+
+The block replication is used for continuous checkpoints. It is designed
+for COLO that Secondary VM is running. It can also be applied for FT/HA
+scene that Secondary VM is not running.
+
+This document gives an overview of block replication's design.
+
+== Background ==
+High availability solutions such as micro checkpoint and COLO will do
+consecutive checkpoint. The VM state of Primary VM and Secondary VM is
+identical right after a VM checkpoint, but becomes different as the VM
+executes till the next checkpoint. To support disk contents checkpoint,
+the modified disk contents in the Secondary VM must be buffered, and are
+only dropped at next checkpoint time. To reduce the network transportation
+effort at the time of checkpoint, the disk modification operations of
+Primary disk are asynchronously forwarded to the Secondary node.
+
+== Workflow ==
+The following is the image of block replication workflow:
+
+        +----------------------+            +------------------------+
+        |Primary Write Requests|            |Secondary Write Requests|
+        +----------------------+            +------------------------+
+                  |                                       |
+                  |                                      (4)
+                  |                                       V
+                  |                              /-------------\
+                  |      Copy and Forward        |             |
+                  |---------(1)----------+       | Disk Buffer |
+                  |                      |       |             |
+                  |                     (3)      \-------------/
+                  |                 speculative      ^
+                  |                write through    (2)
+                  |                      |           |
+                  V                      V           |
+           +--------------+           +----------------+
+           | Primary Disk |           | Secondary Disk |
+           +--------------+           +----------------+
+
+    1) Primary write requests will be copied and forwarded to Secondary
+       QEMU.
+    2) Before Primary write requests are written to Secondary disk, the
+       original sector content will be read from Secondary disk and
+       buffered in the Disk buffer, but it will not overwrite the existing
+       sector content in the Disk buffer.
+    3) Primary write requests will be written to Secondary disk.
+    4) Secondary write requests will be buffered in the Disk buffer and it
+       will overwrite the existing sector content in the buffer.
+
+== Architecture ==
+We are going to implement COLO block replication from many basic
+blocks that are already in QEMU.
+
+         virtio-blk       ||
+             ^            ||                            .----------
+             |            ||                            | Secondary
+        1 Quorum          ||                            '----------
+         /      \         ||
+        /        \        ||
+   Primary      2 NBD  ------->  2 NBD
+     disk       client    ||     server                  virtio-blk
+                          ||        ^                         ^
+--------.                 ||        |                         |
+Primary |                 ||  Secondary disk <--------- COLO buffer 3
+--------'                 ||                   backing
+
+1) The disk on the primary is represented by a block device with two
+children, providing replication between a primary disk and the host that
+runs the secondary VM. The read pattern for quorum can be extended to
+make the primary always read from the local disk instead of going through
+NBD.
+
+2) The secondary disk receives writes from the primary VM through QEMU's
+embedded NBD server (speculative write-through).
+
+3) The disk on the secondary is represented by a custom block device
+("COLO buffer"). The disk buffer's backing image is the secondary disk,
+and the disk buffer uses bdrv_add_before_write_notifier to implement
+copy-on-write, similar to block/backup.c.
+
+== New block driver interface ==
+We add three block driver interfaces to control block replication:
+a. bdrv_start_replication()
+   Start block replication, called in migration/checkpoint thread.
+   We must call bdrv_start_replication() in secondary QEMU before
+   calling bdrv_start_replication() in primary QEMU.
+b. bdrv_do_checkpoint()
+   This interface is called after all VM state is transfered to
+   Secondary QEMU. The Disk buffer will be dropped in this interface.
+c. bdrv_stop_replication()
+   It is called when failover. We will flush the Disk buffer into
+   Secondary Disk and stop block replication.
+
+== Usage ==
+Primary:
+  -drive if=xxx,driver=quorum,read-pattern=first,\
+         children.0.file.filename=1.raw,\
+         children.0.driver=raw,\
+         children.1.file.driver=nbd+colo,\
+         children.1.file.host=xxx,\
+         children.1.file.port=xxx,\
+         children.1.file.export=xxx,\
+         children.1.driver=raw
+  Note:
+  1. NBD Client should not be the first child of quorum.
+  2. There should be only one NBD Client.
+  3. host is the secondary physical machine's hostname or IP
+  4. Each disk must have its own export name.
+
+Secondary:
+  -drive if=xxx,driver=blkcolo,export=xxx,\
+         backing.file.filename=1.raw,\
+         backing.driver=raw
+  Then run qmp command:
+    nbd_server_start host:port
+  Note:
+  1. The export name for the same disk must be the same in primary
+     and secondary QEMU command line
+  2. The qmp command nbd_server_start must be run before running the
+     qmp command migrate on primary QEMU
+  3. Don't use nbd_server_start's other options
-- 
2.1.0