On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 4:53 AM, Wenchao Xia <address@hidden> wrote:
于 2013-8-12 19:33, Stefan Hajnoczi 写道:
On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Alex Bligh <address@hidden> wrote:
--On 12 August 2013 11:59:03 +0200 Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden>
wrote:
The idea that was discussed on address@hidden uses fork(2) to
capture the state of guest RAM and then send it back to the parent
process. The guest is only paused for a brief instant during fork(2)
and can continue to run afterwards.
How would you capture the state of emulated hardware which might not
be in the guest RAM?
Exactly the same way vmsave works today. It calls the device's save
functions which serialize state to file.
The difference between today's vmsave and the fork(2) approach is that
QEMU does not need to wait for guest RAM to be written to file before
resuming the guest.
Stefan
I have a worry about what glib says:
"On Unix, the GLib mainloop is incompatible with fork(). Any program
using the mainloop must either exec() or exit() from the child without
returning to the mainloop. "
This is fine, the child just writes out the memory pages and exits.
It never returns to the glib mainloop.
There is another way to do it: intercept the write in kvm.ko(or other
kernel code). Since the key is intercept the memory change, we can do
it in userspace in TCG mode, thus we can add the missing part in KVM
mode. Another benefit of this way is: the used memory can be
controlled. For example, with ioctl(), set a buffer of a fixed size
which keeps the intercepted write data by kernel code, which can avoid
frequently switch back to user space qemu code. when it is full always
return back to userspace's qemu code, let qemu code save the data into
disk. I haven't check the exactly behavior of Intel guest mode about
how to handle page fault, so can't estimate the performance caused by
switching of guest mode and root mode, but it should not be worse than
fork().
The fork(2) approach is portable, covers both KVM and TCG, and doesn't
require kernel changes. A kvm.ko kernel change also won't be
supported on existing KVM hosts. These are big drawbacks and the
kernel approach would need to be significantly better than plain old
fork(2) to make it worthwhile.
Stefan