[Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Andre Przywara]

Hi,

while testing the guest multi-core code, I realized that all of the 
cpuid_* values (like cpuid_ext_features,...) from CPUX86State are not 
dumped in the migration stream. Is this intentional behavior (to let the 
user specify other bits in the target?) or has this just been forgotten?
Does KVM call the SET_CPUID2 ioctl after or before migration?

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-OSRC (Dresden)
Tel: x29712

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Anthony Liguori]

Andre Przywara wrote:
> Hi,
>
> while testing the guest multi-core code, I realized that all of the 
> cpuid_* values (like cpuid_ext_features,...) from CPUX86State are not 
> dumped in the migration stream. Is this intentional behavior (to let 
> the user specify other bits in the target?) or has this just been 
> forgotten?
> Does KVM call the SET_CPUID2 ioctl after or before migration?

The cpuid bits are specified by the user.  They aren't changable by the 
guest which is why they haven't been migrated.

It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming migration.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Regards,
> Andre.
>

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Jamie Lokier]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
> values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming migration.

The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?

For changing cpuid when migrating, as you might like to do with -cpu
host for performance, is reboot-during-migrate useful?  It would make
sure all disk state is committed to the image files asynchronously
while the machine continues to run (just like normal migration), and
at the last moment transfers control and the machine sees a reboot,
permitting devices changes including cpuid change.

CPU hotplug could be used for cpuid change in theory, but I doubt if
any guests or guest apps would handle it well.

-- Jamie

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Dor Laor]

On 07/15/2009 06:12 PM, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid
>> values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming migration.

Actually, it might be better to build all of the guest configurations 
(devices, cpu, etc) from the migration stream, without stating them in 
the destination command line.

The destination command line should only contain host configuration.
It will bypass any type of conflict between the src/dst pairs.

>
> The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
> whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?
>
> For changing cpuid when migrating, as you might like to do with -cpu
> host for performance, is reboot-during-migrate useful?  It would make
> sure all disk state is committed to the image files asynchronously
> while the machine continues to run (just like normal migration), and
> at the last moment transfers control and the machine sees a reboot,
> permitting devices changes including cpuid change.
>
> CPU hotplug could be used for cpuid change in theory, but I doubt if
> any guests or guest apps would handle it well.

We should just fail migration in case the destination host cannot match 
the source requirements (cpuid, cpu vendor type (optionally emulate 
them), etc).
The complexity does not worth the gain and it won't be common practice.



>
> -- Jamie
>
>

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Andre Przywara]

Dor Laor wrote:
> On 07/15/2009 06:12 PM, Jamie Lokier wrote:
>> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>> It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid
>>> values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming 
>>> migration.
> 
> Actually, it might be better to build all of the guest configurations 
> (devices, cpu, etc) from the migration stream, without stating them in 
> the destination command line.
> 
> The destination command line should only contain host configuration.
> It will bypass any type of conflict between the src/dst pairs.
I think there were some ideas on implementing this (transfer of guest 
configuration in a separate savevm section) in the past. Has someone 
started looking at this?

>>
>> The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
>> whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?
>>
>> For changing cpuid when migrating, as you might like to do with -cpu
>> host for performance, is reboot-during-migrate useful?  It would make
>> sure all disk state is committed to the image files asynchronously
>> while the machine continues to run (just like normal migration), and
>> at the last moment transfers control and the machine sees a reboot,
>> permitting devices changes including cpuid change.
>>
>> CPU hotplug could be used for cpuid change in theory, but I doubt if
>> any guests or guest apps would handle it well.
> 
> We should just fail migration in case the destination host cannot match 
> the source requirements (cpuid, cpu vendor type (optionally emulate 
> them), etc).
> The complexity does not worth the gain and it won't be common practice.

For items not efficiently emulate-able (like SSE4) I agree. But I would 
try to make this list as short as possible. For instance I have an idea 
on how to cope with missing host's NX/XD capability, so one does not 
need to dump this feature because there is a single incapable box in the 
migration pool.

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 448 3567 12
----to satisfy European Law for business letters:
Advanced Micro Devices GmbH
Karl-Hammerschmidt-Str. 34, 85609 Dornach b. Muenchen
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas M. McCoy; Giuliano Meroni
Sitz: Dornach, Gemeinde Aschheim, Landkreis Muenchen
Registergericht Muenchen, HRB Nr. 43632

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Jamie Lokier]

Dor Laor wrote:
> On 07/15/2009 06:12 PM, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> >Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >>It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid
> >>values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming 
> >>migration.
> 
> Actually, it might be better to build all of the guest configurations 
> (devices, cpu, etc) from the migration stream, without stating them in 
> the destination command line.
> 
> The destination command line should only contain host configuration.
> It will bypass any type of conflict between the src/dst pairs.

I agree, but this will be a lot simpler and more satisfying once
there's a machine configuration file which can be dumped from qemu and
reloaded into it, with host configuration from the command line merged
into the configuration file at load time.

-- Jamie

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Andre Przywara]

Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
>> values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming migration.
> 
> The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
> whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?

If you plan to migrate, you should think of this in advance. I have a 
rough version of a tool to compute the least common denominator CPUID 
bits given either processor (code)names or host names. In the latter 
case it will login into the box and query the host's CPUID. The tool 
then generates a QEMU command line (like -cpu qemu64,-mwait,-popcnt) 
with which the guest should be started.
This should ensure that the guest always sees the same subset of the 
CPUs capabilities.

> For changing cpuid when migrating, as you might like to do with -cpu
> host for performance, is reboot-during-migrate useful?  It would make
> sure all disk state is committed to the image files asynchronously
> while the machine continues to run (just like normal migration), and
> at the last moment transfers control and the machine sees a reboot,
> permitting devices changes including cpuid change.
Is that really useful? After all the sexy part of live migration is the 
"live" component...

> CPU hotplug could be used for cpuid change in theory, but I doubt if
> any guests or guest apps would handle it well.
Hotplugging could work for secondary processors, but hotplugging the BSP 
is kind of tricky. And this does not solve the userspace issues, where 
libraries detect CPU capabilities during startup and use optimized code 
paths. AFAIK there is no mechanism of informing those libraries about a 
CPUID change.

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 448 3567 12
----to satisfy European Law for business letters:
Advanced Micro Devices GmbH
Karl-Hammerschmidt-Str. 34, 85609 Dornach b. Muenchen
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas M. McCoy; Giuliano Meroni
Sitz: Dornach, Gemeinde Aschheim, Landkreis Muenchen
Registergericht Muenchen, HRB Nr. 43632

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Jamie Lokier]

Andre Przywara wrote:
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> >Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >>It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
> >>values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming 
> >>migration.
> >
> >The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
> >whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?
> 
> If you plan to migrate, you should think of this in advance.

In my experience so far, for small sites, you don't plan migration for
2-3 years after starting the VM, because it's only then you realise
your host hardware is quite old, you buy a replacement to consolidate,
and you are still running the VM that you didn't know would still be
mission critical years later.

At least, that's been my experience so far.  I've "cold migrated" a
few VMs, and in some cases from non-virtual machines to VMs.  None of
these could be planned when the guest was first installed, especially
the ones where it wasn't realised the guest would outlive the host
hardware.

I have to say, unfortunately hot migration has never been an option
because the version of KVM running on the new host is invariably
incompatible with the KVM running on the old host.

> I have a rough version of a tool to compute the least common
> denominator CPUID bits given either processor (code)names or host
> names. In the latter case it will login into the box and query the
> host's CPUID. The tool then generates a QEMU command line (like -cpu
> qemu64,-mwait,-popcnt) with which the guest should be started.  This
> should ensure that the guest always sees the same subset of the CPUs
> capabilities.

I wonder how that would be useful.  Don't you usually migrate only
when you've acquired new hardware, who's specs you don't know at the
time you'd want to compute the initial CPUID?

> >For changing cpuid when migrating, as you might like to do with -cpu
> >host for performance, is reboot-during-migrate useful?  It would make
> >sure all disk state is committed to the image files asynchronously
> >while the machine continues to run (just like normal migration), and
> >at the last moment transfers control and the machine sees a reboot,
> >permitting devices changes including cpuid change.
>
> Is that really useful? After all the sexy part of live migration is the 
> "live" component...

The other sexy part is being easy and asynchronous: not stopping the
guest for a long time during the migration.

Easy: Now, at the moment you have to give all the right guest
configuration on the destination command line, so I take your point.

But if guest configuration is ever included in the saved state for
migration, migration will really easy.  I hope it's just as easy to do
"cold migration".

Async: Do we save RAM state across reboots normally?  I know of OSes
which expect at least some part of RAM to survive reboots, so killing
the VM and restarting on another host would change the behaviour,
compared with rebooting locally; that's not transparent migration,
it's a subtle, unexpected behaviour change.  Unfortunately doing the
right thing involves savev, which pauses the guests for a long time.
The pause comes from saving and loading RAM, something which migration
handles well.

There's also the small matter of migration having a totally different
interface compared with savevm right now, with savevm requiring a
dummy qcow2 disk while migration transfers control across a network
with no temporary file.

Guess which one is nicer for the user wanting "move my VM to host FOO
(which doesn't support SSE4) with minimal downtime".

> >CPU hotplug could be used for cpuid change in theory, but I doubt if
> >any guests or guest apps would handle it well.
> Hotplugging could work for secondary processors, but hotplugging the BSP 
> is kind of tricky. And this does not solve the userspace issues, where 
> libraries detect CPU capabilities during startup and use optimized code 
> paths. AFAIK there is no mechanism of informing those libraries about a 
> CPUID change.

I agree, and it's pointless to spend much time discussion hotplug for this.
Most guests wouldn't handle CPUs with mixed CPUIDs anyway.

In theory, sometimes it'd be ok to push that problem to the user: they
can stop and start specific apps under user control without bringing
down a whole machine, and most apps don't use cpuid-dependent
features, especially on servers.

Btw, why can't hotplugging the main processor work?  For (real)
high-reliability systems, all processors are hotpluggable, afaik.

-- Jamie

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Andre Przywara]

(Sorry for the late reply, I had some mail troubles)

Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Andre Przywara wrote:
>> Jamie Lokier wrote:
>>> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>> It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
>>>> values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming 
>>>> migration.
>>> The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
>>> whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?
>> If you plan to migrate, you should think of this in advance.
> 
> In my experience so far, for small sites, you don't plan migration for
> 2-3 years after starting the VM, because it's only then you realise
> your host hardware is quite old, you buy a replacement to consolidate,
> and you are still running the VM that you didn't know would still be
> mission critical years later.
That is one use-case for live migration. Another would be a migration
pool with lots of machines each running some VMs. If one host is loaded,
you can migrate to a lesser loaded one. Think of a hoster or cloud like
environment.

> 
> At least, that's been my experience so far.  I've "cold migrated" a
> few VMs, and in some cases from non-virtual machines to VMs.  None of
> these could be planned when the guest was first installed, especially
> the ones where it wasn't realised the guest would outlive the host
> hardware.
Fortunately it seems like that newer CPUs only _add_ CPUID bits, so this
should not be a problem.

> 
> I have to say, unfortunately hot migration has never been an option
> because the version of KVM running on the new host is invariably
> incompatible with the KVM running on the old host.
So far I have only seen problems like this if the target host KVM
version is older than the source one. Some of these issues could be
overcome by putting a translator application between source and target,
but I am not sure whether the effort is worth the results.
What kind of issues do you see? Are you migrating from newer KVMs to
older ones?

>> I have a rough version of a tool to compute the least common
>> denominator CPUID bits given either processor (code)names or host
>> names. In the latter case it will login into the box and query the
>> host's CPUID. The tool then generates a QEMU command line (like -cpu
>> qemu64,-mwait,-popcnt) with which the guest should be started.  This
>> should ensure that the guest always sees the same subset of the CPUs
>> capabilities.
> 
> I wonder how that would be useful.  Don't you usually migrate only
> when you've acquired new hardware, who's specs you don't know at the
> time you'd want to compute the initial CPUID?
See above, this tool helps to enlarge the migration pool by computing
the best possible bit set of CPU features.

>>> For changing cpuid when migrating, as you might like to do with -cpu
>>> host for performance, is reboot-during-migrate useful?  It would make
>>> sure all disk state is committed to the image files asynchronously
>>> while the machine continues to run (just like normal migration), and
>>> at the last moment transfers control and the machine sees a reboot,
>>> permitting devices changes including cpuid change.
>> Is that really useful? After all the sexy part of live migration is the 
>> "live" component...
> 
> The other sexy part is being easy and asynchronous: not stopping the
> guest for a long time during the migration.
> 
> Easy: Now, at the moment you have to give all the right guest
> configuration on the destination command line, so I take your point.
> 
> But if guest configuration is ever included in the saved state for
> migration, migration will really easy.  I hope it's just as easy to do
> "cold migration".
Agreed. We should have a savevm section transferring the guest config.
> 
> Async: Do we save RAM state across reboots normally?  I know of OSes
> which expect at least some part of RAM to survive reboots, so killing
> the VM and restarting on another host would change the behaviour,
> compared with rebooting locally; that's not transparent migration,
> it's a subtle, unexpected behaviour change.  Unfortunately doing the
> right thing involves savev, which pauses the guests for a long time.
> The pause comes from saving and loading RAM, something which migration
> handles well.
Have you seen any real life problems with this? What are these OSes?

> There's also the small matter of migration having a totally different
> interface compared with savevm right now, with savevm requiring a
> dummy qcow2 disk while migration transfers control across a network
> with no temporary file.
You are right, that is pretty unfortunate. I worked around this 
limitation by using the exec: prefix with migrate to let a shell script 
dump the migration stream to disk, with the same trick you can reload 
the state again. That worked pretty well for me in the past.

> Guess which one is nicer for the user wanting "move my VM to host FOO
> (which doesn't support SSE4) with minimal downtime".
> 
>>> CPU hotplug could be used for cpuid change in theory, but I doubt if
>>> any guests or guest apps would handle it well.
>> Hotplugging could work for secondary processors, but hotplugging the BSP 
>> is kind of tricky. And this does not solve the userspace issues, where 
>> libraries detect CPU capabilities during startup and use optimized code 
>> paths. AFAIK there is no mechanism of informing those libraries about a 
>> CPUID change.
> 
> I agree, and it's pointless to spend much time discussion hotplug for this.
> Most guests wouldn't handle CPUs with mixed CPUIDs anyway.
> 
> In theory, sometimes it'd be ok to push that problem to the user: they
> can stop and start specific apps under user control without bringing
> down a whole machine, and most apps don't use cpuid-dependent
> features, especially on servers.
But libraries do, even on servers.

> Btw, why can't hotplugging the main processor work?  For (real)
> high-reliability systems, all processors are hotpluggable, afaik.
Yes, but if you look into the Linux code, you will find many assumptions 
about the BSP not being hotpluggable. For instance you cannot offline 
CPU0 (take a look at /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0, there is no online, 
in opposite to all other cpu<n>). I haven't looked in detail, but I 
assume that there is no real showstopper, it is just the current code 
design that makes offlining CPU0 hard.
BTW, do you know of any x86 machines which really allow physical CPU 
hotplugging?

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 448 3567 12
----to satisfy European Law for business letters:
Advanced Micro Devices GmbH
Karl-Hammerschmidt-Str. 34, 85609 Dornach b. Muenchen
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas M. McCoy; Giuliano Meroni
Sitz: Dornach, Gemeinde Aschheim, Landkreis Muenchen
Registergericht Muenchen, HRB Nr. 43632

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Jamie Lokier]

Andre Przywara wrote:
> (Sorry for the late reply, I had some mail troubles)
> 
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> >Andre Przywara wrote:
> >>Jamie Lokier wrote:
> >>>Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >>>>It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
> >>>>values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming 
> >>>>migration.
> >>>The new host might not support all the cpuid features of the old host,
> >>>whether by -cpu host or explicit cpuid.  What happens then?
> >>If you plan to migrate, you should think of this in advance.
> >
> >In my experience so far, for small sites, you don't plan migration for
> >2-3 years after starting the VM, because it's only then you realise
> >your host hardware is quite old, you buy a replacement to consolidate,
> >and you are still running the VM that you didn't know would still be
> >mission critical years later.
>
> That is one use-case for live migration. Another would be a migration
> pool with lots of machines each running some VMs. If one host is loaded,
> you can migrate to a lesser loaded one. Think of a hoster or cloud like
> environment.

I realise that, and I was objecting to the apparent assumption that a
pool type environment is the only use-case for migration.

> >At least, that's been my experience so far.  I've "cold migrated" a
> >few VMs, and in some cases from non-virtual machines to VMs.  None of
> >these could be planned when the guest was first installed, especially
> >the ones where it wasn't realised the guest would outlive the host
> >hardware.
> Fortunately it seems like that newer CPUs only _add_ CPUID bits, so this
> should not be a problem.

Again, not my experience.  They only add CPUID bits when you buy CPUs
from the same manufacturer.  Ok, there's only three manufacturers, but
they are different.

> >I have to say, unfortunately hot migration has never been an option
> >because the version of KVM running on the new host is invariably
> >incompatible with the KVM running on the old host.

> So far I have only seen problems like this if the target host KVM
> version is older than the source one. Some of these issues could be
> overcome by putting a translator application between source and target,
> but I am not sure whether the effort is worth the results.
> What kind of issues do you see? Are you migrating from newer KVMs to
> older ones?

I've never migrated to an older KVM.  Or to be honest, to a newer one.
I've tried loadvm of a previous savevm, and that didn't work from an
older KVM to a newer one.

Since then I think I've understood from on this list that
cross-version migration (loadvm or migrate) in either direction is not
supported, is not worth supporting, and should not be expected to work.

> >But if guest configuration is ever included in the saved state for
> >migration, migration will really easy.  I hope it's just as easy to do
> >"cold migration".
> Agreed. We should have a savevm section transferring the guest config.

I'm glad it's not just me :-)

> >Async: Do we save RAM state across reboots normally?  I know of OSes
> >which expect at least some part of RAM to survive reboots, so killing
> >the VM and restarting on another host would change the behaviour,
> >compared with rebooting locally; that's not transparent migration,
> >it's a subtle, unexpected behaviour change.  Unfortunately doing the
> >right thing involves savev, which pauses the guests for a long time.
> >The pause comes from saving and loading RAM, something which migration
> >handles well.
> Have you seen any real life problems with this? What are these OSes?

I've wanted to periodically snapshot a live server while it was
running, as a sort of backup against screwups, and I tried using
savevm.

It was running Windows Server 2003 at the time; now it's Server 2008,
and the host is Ubuntu Linux 8.10 with KVM built from source.  But I
don't think any of those versions are relevant.

It was unacceptable to invoke "savevm" periodically, because it took
some 20 seconds or more (I don't remember exactly) with the VM paused;
that was a live server.  I'm guessing that must have been the time to
save the RAM contents.

>From that I concluded that savevm+loadvm would take >40 seconds of
downtime to transfer across hosts.  Which isn't awful, but using the
migration facility would clearly be much less downtime.

> >There's also the small matter of migration having a totally different
> >interface compared with savevm right now, with savevm requiring a
> >dummy qcow2 disk while migration transfers control across a network
> >with no temporary file.
> You are right, that is pretty unfortunate. I worked around this 
> limitation by using the exec: prefix with migrate to let a shell script 
> dump the migration stream to disk, with the same trick you can reload 
> the state again. That worked pretty well for me in the past.

That's nice; I like that.  Maybe savevm could just use it ;-)

> BTW, do you know of any x86 machines which really allow physical CPU 
> hotplugging?

I have the impression the ES7000 does, but that's impressions from
mailing list postings which never made it completely clear.

-- Jamie

Re: [Qemu-devel] CPUID feature bits not saved with migration

[Andre Przywara]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Andre Przywara wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> while testing the guest multi-core code, I realized that all of the 
>> cpuid_* values (like cpuid_ext_features,...) from CPUX86State are not 
>> dumped in the migration stream. Is this intentional behavior (to let 
>> the user specify other bits in the target?) or has this just been 
>> forgotten?
>> Does KVM call the SET_CPUID2 ioctl after or before migration?
> 
> The cpuid bits are specified by the user.  They aren't changable by the 
> guest which is why they haven't been migrated.
OK, I see your point. What has happened with the idea of using a 
separate savevm section to transfer the guest configuration parts?

> 
> It's unclear what to do about -cpu host.  If we did migrate cpuid 
> values, then -cpu would effectively be ignored after an incoming migration.
You do not want to migrate with -cpu host, this is only for a desktop 
virtualization use-case where you are pretty sure that you will not 
migrate. I have started working on "-cpu migrate", which uses some kind 
of least common denominator bits for the KVM case (that is all CPUs with 
hardware virtualization support). Currently there seems to be not much 
difference to qemu64, so maybe we don't need it.

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 448 3567 12
----to satisfy European Law for business letters:
Advanced Micro Devices GmbH
Karl-Hammerschmidt-Str. 34, 85609 Dornach b. Muenchen
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas M. McCoy; Giuliano Meroni
Sitz: Dornach, Gemeinde Aschheim, Landkreis Muenchen
Registergericht Muenchen, HRB Nr. 43632