Re: [PATCH] migration: for snapshots, hold the BQL during setup callbacks

[Juan Quintela]

Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> wrote:

Hi

[Adding Kevin to the party]

> On Fri, May 05, 2023 at 03:46:52PM +0200, Fiona Ebner wrote:
>> To fix it, ensure that the BQL is held during setup. To avoid changing
>> the behavior for migration too, introduce conditionals for the setup
>> callbacks that need the BQL and only take the lock if it's not already
>> held.
>
> The major complexity of this patch is the "conditionally taking" part.

Yeap.

I don't want that bit.

This is another case of:
- I have a problem
- I will use recursive mutexes to solve it

Now you have two problems O:-)

> Pure question: what is the benefit of not holding BQL always during
> save_setup(), if after all we have this coroutine issue to be solved?

Dunno.

I would like that paolo commented on this.  I "reviewed the code" 10
years ago.  I don't remember at all why we wanted to change that.

> I can understand that it helps us to avoid taking BQL too long, but we'll
> need to take it anyway during ramblock dirty track initializations, and so
> far IIUC it's the major time to be consumed during setup().
>
> Commit message of 9b0950375277467 says, "Only the migration_bitmap_sync()
> call needs the iothread lock". Firstly I think it's also covering
> enablement of dirty tracking:
>
> +    qemu_mutex_lock_iothread();
> +    qemu_mutex_lock_ramlist();
> +    bytes_transferred = 0;
> +    reset_ram_globals();
> +
>      memory_global_dirty_log_start();
>      migration_bitmap_sync();
> +    qemu_mutex_unlock_iothread();
>
> And I think enablement itself can be slow too, maybe even slower than
> migration_bitmap_sync() especially with KVM_DIRTY_LOG_INITIALLY_SET
> supported in the kernel.
>
> Meanwhile I always got confused on why we need to sync dirty bitmap when
> setup at all.  Say, what if we drop migration_bitmap_sync() here?  After
> all, shouldn't all pages be dirty from start (ram_list_init_bitmaps())?

How do you convince KVM (or the other lists) to start doing dirty
tracking?  Doing a bitmap sync.

And yeap, probably there is a better way of doing it.

> This is slightly off-topic, but I'd like to know if someone can help
> answer.
>
> My whole point is still questioning whether we can unconditionally take bql
> during save_setup().

I agree with you.

> I could have missed something, though, where we want to do in setup() but
> avoid holding BQL.  Help needed on figuring this out (and if there is, IMHO
> it'll be worthwhile to put that into comment of save_setup() hook).

I am more towards revert completely
9b0950375277467fd74a9075624477ae43b9bb22

and call it a day.  On migration we don't use coroutines on the sending
side (I mean the migration code, the block layer uses coroutines for
everything/anything).

Paolo, Stefan any clues for not run setup with the BKL?

Later, Juan.