Re: [RFC qemu 0/4] A PV solution for live migration optimization

From: Dr. David Alan Gilbert
Date: Mon Mar 14 2016 - 13:03:49 EST


* Li, Liang Z (liang.z.li@xxxxxxxxx) 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@xxxxxxxxxx / Manchester, UK
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@xxxxxxxxxx / Manchester, UK