Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC v2 0/8] monitor: allow per-monitor thread

[Peter Xu]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2017 at 12:54:28PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 06, 2017 at 12:31:58PM +0100, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> > * Daniel P. Berrange (address@hidden) wrote:
> > > This does imply that you need a separate monitor I/O processing, from the
> > > command execution thread, but I see no need for all commands to suddenly
> > > become async. Just allowing interleaved replies is sufficient from the
> > > POV of the protocol definition. This interleaving is easy to handle from
> > > the client POV - just requires a unique 'serial' in the request by the
> > > client, that is copied into the reply by QEMU.
> > 
> > OK, so for that we can just take Marc-André's syntax and call it 'id':
> >   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-01/msg03634.html
> > 
> > then it's upto the caller to ensure those id's are unique.
> 
> Libvirt has in fact generated a unique 'id' for every monitor command
> since day 1 of supporting QMP.
> 
> > I do worry about two things:
> >   a) With this the caller doesn't really know which commands could be
> >   in parallel - for example if we've got a recovery command that's
> >   executed by this non-locking thread that's OK, we expect that
> >   to be doable in parallel.  If in the future though we do
> >   what you initially suggested and have a bunch of commands get
> >   routed to the migration thread (say) then those would suddenly
> >   operate in parallel with other commands that we're previously
> >   synchronous.
> 
> We could still have an opt-in for async commands. eg default to executing
> all commands in the main thread, unless the client issues an explicit
> "make it async" command, to switch to allowing the migration thread to
> process it async.
> 
>  { "execute": "qmp_allow_async",
>    "data": { "commands": [
>        "migrate_cancel",
>    ] } }
> 
> 
>  { "return": { "commands": [
>        "migrate_cancel",
>    ] } }
> 
> The server response contains the subset of commands from the request
> for which async is supported.
> 
> That gives good negotiation ability going forward as we incrementally
> support async on more commands.

I think this goes back to the discussion on which design we'd like to
choose.  IMHO the whole async idea plus the per-command-id is indeed
cleaner and nicer, and I believe that can benefit not only libvirt,
but also other QMP users.  The problem is, I have no idea how long
it'll take to let us have such a feature - I believe that will include
QEMU and Libvirt to both support that.  And it'll be a pity if the
postcopy recovery cannot work only because we cannot guarantee a
stable monitor.

I'm curious whether there are other requirements (besides postcopy
recovery) that would want an always-alive monitor to run some
lock-free commands?  If there is, I'd be more inclined to first
provide a work-around solution like "-qmp-lockfree", and we can
provide a better solution afterwards until when the whole async QMP
work ready.

> 
> >   b) I still worry how the various IO channels will behave on another
> >   thread.  But that's more a general feeling rather than anything
> >   specific.
> 
> The only complexity will be around making sure the Chardev code uses
> the right GMainContext for any watches on the underlying QIOChannel,
> so that we poll() from the custom thread instead of the main thread.
> IOW, as long as all I/O is done from the single thread everything
> should work fine.
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> -- 
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-- 
Peter Xu