Re: [PATCH v3 23/23] migration: Use multifd before we check for the zero page

[Juan Quintela]

Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2021 at 06:38:27PM +0100, Juan Quintela wrote:
>> This needs to be improved to be compatible with old versions.
>
> Any plan to let new binary work with old binary?

Yes, but I was waiting for 7.0 to get out.  Basically I need to do:

if (old)
    run the old code
else
    new code

this needs to be done only in a couple of places, but I need the
machine_type 7.0 created to put the property there.

> Maybe boost the version field for multifd packet (along with a
> multifd_version=2 parameter and only set on new machine types)?

For now, we only need to add a flag for the ZERO_PAGE functionality.  if
we are on older qemu, just don't test for zero pages.  On reception, we
can just accept everything, i.e. if there are no zero pages, everything
is ok.

> PS: We should really have some handshake mechanism between src/dst, I dreamt 
> it
> for a long time..  So that we only need to specify the capability/parameters 
> on
> src someday and we'll never see incompatible migration failing randomly 
> because
> the handshake should guarantee no stupid mistake..  Sad.

That has been on my ToDo list for too long, just need the time to do
it.  It would make everything much, much easier.

>> But .... if we don't care about RDMA, why do we care about
>> control_save_page()?
>
> Could anyone help to explain why we don't care?  I still see bugfixes coming..

Sentence was inside a context.  We don't care for RDMA while we are on
multifd.  If multifd ever supports RDMA, it would be a new
implementation that don't use such hooks.

IMVHO, RDMA implementation in qemu is quite bad.  For historic reasons,
they needed to use qemu_file abstraction for comunication, so they are
dropping directly the ability of doing direct copies of pages.
So, if one is requiring to mlock all the guest memory on both sides to
use RDMA, the *right* thing to do from my point of view is just
"remotely" read the page without any overhead.

Yes, that requires quite a bit of changes, I was not suggesting that it
was a trivial task.

Later, Juan.