Re: [RFC Patch 00/12] IXGBE: Add live migration support for SRIOV NIC

From: Alexander Duyck
Date: Mon Oct 26 2015 - 11:03:30 EST


On 10/25/2015 10:36 PM, Lan Tianyu wrote:
On 2015å10æ24æ 02:36, Alexander Duyck wrote:
I was thinking about it and I am pretty sure the dummy write approach is
problematic at best. Specifically the issue is that while you are
performing a dummy write you risk pulling in descriptors for data that
hasn't been dummy written to yet. So when you resume and restore your
descriptors you will have once that may contain Rx descriptors
indicating they contain data when after the migration they don't.
How about changing sequence? dummy writing Rx packet data fist and then
its desc. This can ensure that RX data is migrated before its desc and
prevent such case.

No. I think you are missing the fact that there are 256 descriptors per page. As such if you dirty just 1 you will be pulling in 255 more, of which you may or may not have pulled in the receive buffer for.

So for example if you have the descriptor ring size set to 256 then that means you are going to get whatever the descriptor ring has since you will be marking the entire ring dirty with every packet processed, however you cannot guarantee that you are going to get all of the receive buffers unless you go through and flush the entire ring prior to migrating.

This is why I have said you will need to do something to force the rings to be flushed such as initiating a PM suspend prior to migrating. You need to do something to stop the DMA and flush the remaining Rx buffers if you want to have any hope of being able to migrate the Rx in a consistent state. Beyond that the only other thing you have to worry about are the Rx buffers that have already been handed off to the stack. However those should be handled if you do a suspend and somehow flag pages as dirty when they are unmapped from the DMA.

- Alex
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