Re: [Qemu-devel] Live migration without bdrv_drain_all()

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 06:56:42PM +0000, Felipe Franciosi wrote:
> Heya!
> 
> > On 29 Aug 2016, at 08:06, Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > At KVM Forum an interesting idea was proposed to avoid
> > bdrv_drain_all() during live migration.  Mike Cui and Felipe Franciosi
> > mentioned running at queue depth 1.  It needs more thought to make it
> > workable but I want to capture it here for discussion and to archive
> > it.
> > 
> > bdrv_drain_all() is synchronous and can cause VM downtime if I/O
> > requests hang.  We should find a better way of quiescing I/O that is
> > not synchronous.  Up until now I thought we should simply add a
> > timeout to bdrv_drain_all() so it can at least fail (and live
> > migration would fail) if I/O is stuck instead of hanging the VM.  But
> > the following approach is also interesting...
> > 
> > During the iteration phase of live migration we could limit the queue
> > depth so points with no I/O requests in-flight are identified.  At
> > these points the migration algorithm has the opportunity to move to
> > the next phase without requiring bdrv_drain_all() since no requests
> > are pending.
> 
> I actually think that this "io quiesced state" is highly unlikely to _just_ 
> happen on a busy guest. The main idea behind running at QD1 is to naturally 
> throttle the guest and make it easier to "force quiesce" the VQs.
> 
> In other words, if the guest is busy and we run at QD1, I would expect the 
> rings to be quite full of pending (ie. unprocessed) requests. At the same 
> time, I would expect that a call to bdrv_drain_all() (as part of 
> do_vm_stop()) should complete much quicker.
> 
> Nevertheless, you mentioned that this is still problematic as that single 
> outstanding IO could block, leaving the VM paused for longer.
> 
> My suggestion is therefore that we leave the vCPUs running, but stop picking 
> up requests from the VQs. Provided nothing blocks, you should reach the "io 
> quiesced state" fairly quickly. If you don't, then the VM is at least still 
> running (despite seeing no progress on its VQs).
> 
> Thoughts on that?

If the guest experiences a hung disk it may enter error recovery.  QEMU
should avoid this so the guest doesn't remount file systems read-only.

This can be solved by only quiescing the disk for, say, 30 seconds at a
time.  If we don't reach a point where live migration can proceed during
those 30 seconds then the disk will service requests again temporarily
to avoid upsetting the guest.

I wonder if Juan or David have any thoughts from the live migration
perspective?

Stefan

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