Re: [PATCH V3 00/22] Live Update

[Steven Sistare]

On 5/12/2021 12:42 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Fri, May 07, 2021 at 05:24:58AM -0700, Steve Sistare wrote:
>> Provide the cprsave and cprload commands for live update.  These save and
>> restore VM state, with minimal guest pause time, so that qemu may be updated
>> to a new version in between.
>>
>> cprsave stops the VM and saves vmstate to an ordinary file.  It supports two
>> modes: restart and reboot.  For restart, cprsave exec's the qemu binary (or
>> /usr/bin/qemu-exec if it exists) with the same argv.  qemu restarts in a
>> paused state and waits for the cprload command.
> 
> I think cprsave/cprload could be generalized by using QMP to stash the
> file descriptors. The 'getfd' QMP command already exists and QEMU code
> already opens fds passed using this mechanism.
> 
> I haven't checked but it may be possible to drop some patches by reusing
> QEMU's monitor file descriptor passing since the code already knows how
> to open from 'getfd' fds.
> 
> The reason why using QMP is interesting is because it eliminates the
> need for execve(2). QEMU may be unable to execute a program due to
> chroot, seccomp, etc.
> 
> QMP would enable cprsave/cprload to work both with and without
> execve(2).
> 
> One tricky thing with this approach might be startup ordering: how to
> get fds via the QMP monitor in the new process before processing the
> entire command-line.

Early on I experimented with a similar approach.  Old qemu passed descriptors 
to an
escrow process and exited; new qemu started and retrieved the descriptors from 
escrow.
vfio mostly worked after I hacked the kernel to suppress the original-pid owner 
check.
I suspect my recent vfio extensions would smooth the rough edges.

However, the main issue is that guest ram must be backed by named shared 
memory, and
we would need to add code to support shared memory for all the secondary memory 
objects.
That makes it less interesting for us at this time; we care about updating 
legacy qemu 
instances with anonymous guest memory.

Having said all that, this would be an interesting project, just not the one I 
want to 
push now.  In the future we could add a new cprsave mode to support it in a 
backward
compatible manner.

- Steve