[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH v5 4/5] Inter-VM shared memory PCI device

[Anthony Liguori]

On 05/11/2010 02:59 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > (Replying again to list)
> >
> > What data structure would you use?  For a lockless ring queue, you 
> > can only support a single producer and consumer.  To achieve 
> > bidirectional communication in virtio, we always use two queues.
>
>
> You don't have to use a lockless ring queue.  You can use locks 
> (spinlocks without interrupt support, full mutexes with interrupts) 
> and any data structure you like.  Say a hash table + LRU for a shared 
> cache.

Yeah, the mailslot enables this.

I think the question boils down to whether we can support transparent 
peer connections and disconnections.  I think that's important in order 
to support transparent live migration.

If you have two peers that are disconnected and then connect to each 
other, there's simply no way to choose who's content gets preserved.  
It's necessary to designate one peer as a master in order to break the tie.

So this could simply involve an additional option to the shared memory 
driver: role=master|peer.  If role=master, when a new shared memory 
segment is mapped, the contents of the BAR ram is memcpy()'d to the 
shared memory segment.  In either case, the contents of the shared 
memory segment should be memcpy()'d to the BAR ram whenever the shared 
memory segment is disconnected.

I believe role=master should be default because I think a relationship 
of master/slave is going to be much more common than peering.

> > If you're adding additional queues to support other levels of 
> > communication, you can always use different areas of shared memory.
>
> You'll need O(n^2) shared memory areas (n=peer count), and it is a lot 
> less flexible that real shared memory.  Consider using threading where 
> the only communication among threads is a pipe (erlang?)

I can't think of a use of multiple peers via shared memory today with 
virtualization.  I know lots of master/slave uses of shared memory 
though.  I agree that it's useful to support from an academic 
perspective but I don't believe it's going to be the common use.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori