Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 00/27] Migration thread (WIP)

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

On 2012-07-24 20:36, Juan Quintela wrote:
> Hi
> 
> This series are on top of the migration-next-v5 series just posted.
> 
> First of all, this is an RFC/Work in progress.  Just a lot of people
> asked for it, and I would like review of the design.
> 
> It does:
> - get a new bitmap for migration, and that bitmap uses 1 bit by page
> - it unfolds migration_buffered_file.  Only one user existed.
> - it simplifies buffered_file a lot.
> 
> - About the migration thread, special attention was giving to try to
>   get the series review-able (reviewers would tell if I got it).
> 
> Basic design:
> - we create a new thread instead of a timer function
> - we move all the migration work to that thread (but run everything
>   except the waits with the iothread lock.
> - we move all the writting to outside the iothread lock.  i.e.
>   we walk the state with the iothread hold, and copy everything to one buffer.
>   then we write that buffer to the sockets outside the iothread lock.
> - once here, we move to writting synchronously to the sockets.
> - this allows us to simplify quite a lot.
> 
> And basically, that is it.  Notice that we still do the iterate page
> walking with the iothread held.  Light testing show that we got
> similar speed and latencies than without the thread (notice that
> almost no optimizations done here yet).
> 
> Appart of the review:
> - Are there any locking issues that I have missed (I guess so)
> - stop all cpus correctly.  vm_stop should be called from the iothread,
>   I use the trick of using a bottom half to get that working correctly.
>   but this _implementation_ is ugly as hell.  Is there an easy way
>   of doing it?

vm_stop is prepared to be called from vcpu context as well. I'm not sure
right now if we actually do, but the code is there.

Jan

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