Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 0/4] Introduce the microvm machine type

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

On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 03:43:12PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 25/07/19 15:26, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > The microvm design has a premise and it can be answered definitively
> > through performance analysis.
> > 
> > If I had to explain to someone why PCI or ACPI significantly slows
> > things down, I couldn't honestly do so.  I say significantly because
> > PCI init definitely requires more vmexits but can it be a small
> > number?  For ACPI I have no idea why it would consume significant
> > amounts of time.
> 
> My guess is that it's just a lot of code that has to run. :(
> 
> > Until we have this knowledge, the premise of microvm is unproven and
> > merging it would be premature because maybe we can get into the same
> > ballpark by optimizing existing code.
> > 
> > I'm sorry for being a pain.  I actually think the analysis will
> > support microvm, but it still needs to be done in order to justify it.
> 
> No, you're not a pain, you're explaining your reasoning and that helps.
> 
> To me *maintainability is the biggest consideration* when introducing a
> new feature.  "We can do just as well with q35" is a good reason to
> deprecate and delete microvm, but not a good reason to reject it now as
> long as microvm is good enough in terms of maintainability.  Keeping it
> out of tree only makes it harder to do this kind of experiment.  virtio
> 1 seems to be the biggest remaining blocker and I think it'd be a good
> thing to have even for the ARM virt machine type.

Yep. E.g. virtio-iommu guys wanted that too.

> FWIW the "PCI tax" seems to be ~10 ms in QEMU, ~10 ms in the firmware(*)
> and ~25 ms in the kernel.

How did you measure the qemu time btw?

>  I must say that's pretty good, but it's still
> 30% of the whole boot time and reducing it is the hardest part.  If
> having microvm in tree can help reducing it, good.  Yes, it will get
> users, but most likely they will have to support pc or q35 as a fallback
> so we could still delete microvm at any time with the due deprecation
> period if it turns out to be a failed experiment.
> 
> Whether to use qboot or SeaBIOS for microvm is another story, but it's
> an implementation detail as long as the ROM size doesn't change and/or
> we don't do versioned machine types.  So we can switch from one to the
> other at any time; we can also include qboot directly in QEMU's tree,
> without going through a submodule, which also reduces the infrastructure
> needed (mirrors, etc.) and makes it easier to delete it.
> 
> Paolo
> 
> (*) I measured 15ms in SeaBIOS and 5ms in qboot from the first to the
> last write to 0xcf8.  I suspect part of qboot's 10ms boot time actually
> end up measured as PCI in SeaBIOS, due to different init order, so the
> real firmware cost of PAM and PCI initialization should be 5ms for qboot
> and 10ms for SeaBIOS.