Date:	Mon, 14 Mar 2016 17:03:34 +0000
From:	"Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@...hat.com>
To:	"Li, Liang Z" <liang.z.li@...el.com>
Cc:	Amit Shah <amit.shah@...hat.com>,
	"quintela@...hat.com" <quintela@...hat.com>,
	"qemu-devel@...gnu.org" <qemu-devel@...gnu.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"mst@...hat.com" <mst@...hat.com>,
	"akpm@...ux-foundation.org" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"pbonzini@...hat.com" <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
	"rth@...ddle.net" <rth@...ddle.net>,
	"ehabkost@...hat.com" <ehabkost@...hat.com>,
	"linux-mm@...ck.org" <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	"virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org" 
	<virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
	"kvm@...r.kernel.org" <kvm@...r.kernel.org>,
	"mohan_parthasarathy@....com" <mohan_parthasarathy@....com>,
	"jitendra.kolhe@....com" <jitendra.kolhe@....com>,
	"simhan@....com" <simhan@....com>
Subject: Re: [RFC qemu 0/4] A PV solution for live migration optimization

* Li, Liang Z (liang.z.li@...el.com) wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> >   I'm just catching back up on this thread; so without reference to any
> > particular previous mail in the thread.
> > 
> >   1) How many of the free pages do we tell the host about?
> >      Your main change is telling the host about all the
> >      free pages.
> 
> Yes, all the guest's free pages.
> 
> >      If we tell the host about all the free pages, then we might
> >      end up needing to allocate more pages and update the host
> >      with pages we now want to use; that would have to wait for the
> >      host to acknowledge that use of these pages, since if we don't
> >      wait for it then it might have skipped migrating a page we
> >      just started using (I don't understand how your series solves that).
> >      So the guest probably needs to keep some free pages - how many?
> 
> Actually, there is no need to care about whether the free pages will be used by the host.
> We only care about some of the free pages we get reused by the guest, right?
> 
> The dirty page logging can be used to solve this, starting the dirty page logging before getting
> the free pages informant from guest. Even some of the free pages are modified by the guest
> during the process of getting the free pages information, these modified pages will be traced
> by the dirty page logging mechanism. So in the following migration_bitmap_sync() function.
> The pages in the free pages bitmap, but latter was modified, will be reset to dirty. We won't
> omit any dirtied pages.
> 
> So, guest doesn't need to keep any free pages.

OK, yes, that works; so we do:
  * enable dirty logging
  * ask guest for free pages
  * initialise the migration bitmap as everything-free
  * then later we do the normal sync-dirty bitmap stuff and it all just works.

That's nice and simple.

> >   2) Clearing out caches
> >      Does it make sense to clean caches?  They're apparently useful data
> >      so if we clean them it's likely to slow the guest down; I guess
> >      they're also likely to be fairly static data - so at least fairly
> >      easy to migrate.
> >      The answer here partially depends on what you want from your migration;
> >      if you're after the fastest possible migration time it might make
> >      sense to clean the caches and avoid migrating them; but that might
> >      be at the cost of more disruption to the guest - there's a trade off
> >      somewhere and it's not clear to me how you set that depending on your
> >      guest/network/reqirements.
> > 
> 
> Yes, clean the caches is an option.  Let the users decide using it or not.
> 
> >   3) Why is ballooning slow?
> >      You've got a figure of 5s to balloon on an 8GB VM - but an
> >      8GB VM isn't huge; so I worry about how long it would take
> >      on a big VM.   We need to understand why it's slow
> >        * is it due to the guest shuffling pages around?
> >        * is it due to the virtio-balloon protocol sending one page
> >          at a time?
> >          + Do balloon pages normally clump in physical memory
> >             - i.e. would a 'large balloon' message help
> >             - or do we need a bitmap because it tends not to clump?
> > 
> 
> I didn't do a comprehensive test. But I found most of the time spending
> on allocating the pages and sending the PFNs to guest, I don't know that's
> the most time consuming operation, allocating the pages or sending the PFNs.

It might be a good idea to analyse it a bit more to convince people where
the problem is.

> >        * is it due to the madvise on the host?
> >          If we were using the normal balloon messages, then we
> >          could, during migration, just route those to the migration
> >          code rather than bothering with the madvise.
> >          If they're clumping together we could just turn that into
> >          one big madvise; if they're not then would we benefit from
> >          a call that lets us madvise lots of areas?
> > 
> 
> My test showed madvise() is not the main reason for the long time, only taken
> 10% of the total  inflating balloon operation time.
> Big madvise can more or less improve the performance.

OK; 10% of the total is still pretty big even for your 8GB VM.

> >   4) Speeding up the migration of those free pages
> >     You're using the bitmap to avoid migrating those free pages; HPe's
> >     patchset is reconstructing a bitmap from the balloon data;  OK, so
> >     this all makes sense to avoid migrating them - I'd also been thinking
> >     of using pagemap to spot zero pages that would help find other zero'd
> >     pages, but perhaps ballooned is enough?
> > 
> Could you describe your ideal with more details?

At the moment the migration code spends a fair amount of time checking if a page
is zero; I was thinking perhaps the qemu could just open /proc/self/pagemap
and check if the page was mapped; that would seem cheap if we're checking big
ranges; and that would find all the balloon pages.

> >   5) Second-migrate
> >     Given a VM where you've done all those tricks on, what happens when
> >     you migrate it a second time?   I guess you're aiming for the guest
> >     to update it's bitmap;  HPe's solution is to migrate it's balloon
> >     bitmap along with the migration data.
> 
> Nothing is special in the second migration, QEMU will request the guest for free pages
> Information, and the guest will traverse it's current free page list to construct a
> new free page bitmap and send it to QEMU. Just like in the first migration.

Right.

Dave

> Liang
> > 
> > Dave
> > 
> > --
> > Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@...hat.com / Manchester, UK
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@...hat.com / Manchester, UK

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