Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v7 4/5] virtio-balloon: VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_FREE_PAGE_HINT

[Peter Xu]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 06:04:23PM +0800, Wei Wang wrote:
> On 06/06/2018 01:42 PM, Peter Xu wrote:
> > 
> > IMHO migration states do not suite here.  IMHO bitmap syncing is too
> > frequently an operation, especially at the end of a precopy migration.
> > If you really want to introduce some notifiers, I would prefer
> > something new rather than fiddling around with migration state.  E.g.,
> > maybe a new migration event notifiers, then introduce two new events
> > for both start/end of bitmap syncing.
> 
> Please see if below aligns to what you meant:
> 
> MigrationState {
> ...
> + int ram_save_state;
> 
> }
> 
> typedef enum RamSaveState {
>     RAM_SAVE_BEGIN = 0,
>     RAM_SAVE_END = 1,
>     RAM_SAVE_MAX = 2
> }
> 
> then at the step 1) and 3) you concluded somewhere below, we change the
> state and invoke the callback.

I mean something like this:

1693c64c27 ("postcopy: Add notifier chain", 2018-03-20)

That was a postcopy-only notifier.  Maybe we can generalize it into a
more common notifier for the migration framework so that we can even
register with non-postcopy events like bitmap syncing?

> 
> 
> Btw, the migration_state_notifiers is already there, but seems not really
> used (I only tracked spice-core.c called
> add_migration_state_change_notifier). I thought adding new migration states
> can reuse all that we have.
> What's your real concern about that? (not sure how defining new events would
> make a difference)

Migration state is exposed via control path (QMP).  Adding new states
mean that the QMP clients will see more.  IMO that's not really
anything that a QMP client will need to know, instead we can keep it
internally.  That's a reason from compatibility pov.

Meanwhile, it's not really a state-thing at all for me.  It looks
really more like hook or event (start/stop of sync).

> 
> > > I would suggest to focus on the supplied interface and its usage in live
> > > migration. That is, now we have two APIs, start() and stop(), to start and
> > > stop the optimization.
> > > 
> > > 1) where in the migration code should we use them (do you agree with the
> > > step (1), (2), (3) you concluded below?)
> > > 2) how should we use them, directly do global call or via notifiers?
> > I don't know how Dave and Juan might think; here I tend to agree with
> > Michael that some notifier framework should be nicer.
> > 
> 
> What would be the advantages of using notifiers here?

Isolation of modules?  Then migration/ram.c at least won't need to
include something like "balloon.h".

And I think it's also possible too if some other modules would like to
hook at these places someday.

> 
> 
> 
> > This is not that obvious to me.  For now I think it's true, since when
> > we call stop() we'll take the mutex, meanwhile the mutex is actually
> > always held by the iothread (in the big loop in
> > virtio_balloon_poll_free_page_hints) until either:
> > 
> > - it sleeps in qemu_cond_wait() [1], or
> > - it leaves the big loop [2]
> > 
> > Since I don't see anyone who will set dev->block_iothread to true for
> > the balloon device, then [1] cannot happen;
> 
> there is a case in virtio_balloon_set_status which sets dev->block_iothread
> to true.
> 
> Did you mean the free_page_lock mutex? it is released at the bottom of the
> while() loop in virtio_balloon_poll_free_page_hint. It's actually released
> for every hint. That is,
> 
> while(1){
>     take the lock;
>     process 1 hint from the vq;
>     release the lock;
> }

Ah, so now I understand why you need the lock to be inside the loop,
since the loop is busy polling actually.  Is it possible to do this in
an async way?  I'm a bit curious on how much time will it use to do
one round of the free page hints (e.g., an idle guest with 8G mem, or
any configuration you tested)?  I suppose during that time the
iothread will be held steady with 100% cpu usage, am I right?

> 
> >   then I think when stop()
> > has taken the mutex then the thread must have quitted the big loop,
> > which goes to path [2].  I am not sure my understanding is correct,
> > but in all cases "Step(1) guarantees us that the QEMU side
> > optimization call has exited" is not obvious to me.  Would you add
> > some comment to the code (or even improve the code itself somehow) to
> > help people understand that?
> > 
> > For example, I saw that the old github code has a pthread_join() (in
> > that old code it was not using iothread at all).  That's a very good
> > code example so that people can understand that it's a synchronous
> > operations.
> 
> > > This is enough. If the guest continues to report after that, that
> > > reported hints will be detected as stale hints and dropped in the next 
> > > start
> > > of optimization.
> > This is not clear to me too.  Say, stop() only sets the balloon status
> > to STOP, AFAIU it does not really modify the cmd_id field immediately,
> > then how will the new coming hints be known as stale hints?
> 
> Yes, you get that correctly - stop() only sets the status to STOP. On the
> other side, virtio_balloon_poll_free_page_hints will stop when it sees the
> staus is STOP. The free_page_lock guarantees that when stop() returns,
> virtio_balloon_poll_free_page_hints will not proceed. When
> virtio_balloon_poll_free_page_hints exits, the coming hints are not
> processed any more. They just stay in the vq. The next time start() is
> called, virtio_balloon_poll_free_page_hints works again, it will first drop
> all those stale hints.
> I'll see where I could add some comments to explain.

That'll be nice.

Thanks,

-- 
Peter Xu