Re: [Qemu-devel] [virtio-dev] Re: [PATCH] qemu: Introduce VIRTIO_NET_F_STANDBY feature bit to virtio_net

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 06:07:18PM -0700, Siwei Liu wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 11:14 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 01:40:59PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 2018年06月13日 12:24, Samudrala, Sridhar wrote:
> >> > On 6/12/2018 7:38 PM, Jason Wang wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > >
> >> > > On 2018年06月12日 19:54, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >> > > > On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 10:29:03AM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > On 2018年06月05日 20:33, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >> > > > > > I don't think this is sufficient.
> >> > > > > >
> >> > > > > > If both primary and standby devices are present, a
> >> > > > > > legacy guest without
> >> > > > > > support for the feature might see two devices with same mac and get
> >> > > > > > confused.
> >> > > > > >
> >> > > > > > I think that we should only make primary visible after
> >> > > > > > guest acked the
> >> > > > > > backup feature bit.
> >> > > > > I think we want exactly the reverse? E.g fail the
> >> > > > > negotiation when guest
> >> > > > > does not ack backup feature.
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > Otherwise legacy guest won't even have the chance to see
> >> > > > > primary device in
> >> > > > > the guest.
> >> > > > That's by design.
> >> > >
> >> > > So management needs to know the capability of guest to set the
> >> > > backup feature. This looks a chicken or egg problem to me.
> >> >
> >> > I don't think so. If the tenant requests 'accelerated datapath feature',
> >> > the management
> >> > will set 'standby' feature bit on virtio-net interface and if the guest
> >> > virtio-net driver
> >> > supports this feature, then the tenant VM will get that capability via a
> >> > hot-plugged
> >> > primary device.
> >>
> >> Ok, I thought exactly the reverse because of the commit title is "enable
> >> virtio_net to act as a standby for a passthru device". But re-read the
> >> commit log content, I understand the case a little bit. Btw, VF is not
> >> necessarily faster than virtio-net, especially consider virtio-net may have
> >> a lot of queues.
> >
> > Don't do that then, right?
> 
> I don't understand. Where did the standby feature come to imply the
> "accelerated datapath" thing?
> Isn't failover/standby a generic high
> availblity term, rather than marry it to the concept of device model
> specifics? Do we expect scsi to work exactly the same way with
> "accelerated datapath"?

That's not what I said.
The semantics are that the primary is always used if present in
preference to standby.
Jason said virtio net is sometimes preferable.
If that's the case don't make it a standby.

More advanced use-cases do exist and e.g. Alexander Duyck
suggested using a switch-dev. failover isn't it though.

-- 
MST