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

From: Alexander Duyck
Date: Fri Oct 23 2015 - 14:36:46 EST


On 10/21/2015 09:37 AM, Lan Tianyu wrote:
This patchset is to propose a new solution to add live migration support for 82599
SRIOV network card.

Im our solution, we prefer to put all device specific operation into VF and
PF driver and make code in the Qemu more general.


VF status migration
=================================================================
VF status can be divided into 4 parts
1) PCI configure regs
2) MSIX configure
3) VF status in the PF driver
4) VF MMIO regs

The first three status are all handled by Qemu.
The PCI configure space regs and MSIX configure are originally
stored in Qemu. To save and restore "VF status in the PF driver"
by Qemu during migration, adds new sysfs node "state_in_pf" under
VF sysfs directory.

For VF MMIO regs, we introduce self emulation layer in the VF
driver to record MMIO reg values during reading or writing MMIO
and put these data in the guest memory. It will be migrated with
guest memory to new machine.


VF function restoration
================================================================
Restoring VF function operation are done in the VF and PF driver.

In order to let VF driver to know migration status, Qemu fakes VF
PCI configure regs to indicate migration status and add new sysfs
node "notify_vf" to trigger VF mailbox irq in order to notify VF
about migration status change.

Transmit/Receive descriptor head regs are read-only and can't
be restored via writing back recording reg value directly and they
are set to 0 during VF reset. To reuse original tx/rx rings, shift
desc ring in order to move the desc pointed by original head reg to
first entry of the ring and then enable tx/rx rings. VF restarts to
receive and transmit from original head desc.


Tracking DMA accessed memory
=================================================================
Migration relies on tracking dirty page to migrate memory.
Hardware can't automatically mark a page as dirty after DMA
memory access. VF descriptor rings and data buffers are modified
by hardware when receive and transmit data. To track such dirty memory
manually, do dummy writes(read a byte and write it back) when receive
and transmit data.

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.

I really think the best approach to take would be to look at implementing an emulated IOMMU so that you could track DMA mapped pages and avoid migrating the ones marked as DMA_FROM_DEVICE until they are unmapped. The advantage to this is that in the case of the ixgbevf driver it now reuses the same pages for Rx DMA. As a result it will be rewriting the same pages often and if you are marking those pages as dirty and transitioning them it is possible for a flow of small packets to really make a mess of things since you would be rewriting the same pages in a loop while the device is processing packets.

Beyond that I would say you could suspend/resume the device in order to get it to stop and flush the descriptor rings and any outstanding packets. The code for suspend would unmap the DMA memory which would then be the trigger to flush it across in the migration, and the resume code would take care of any state restoration needed beyond any values that can be configured with the ip link command.

If you wanted to do a proof of concept of this you could probably do so with very little overhead. Basically you would need the "page_addr" portion of patch 12 to emulate a slightly migration aware DMA API, and then beyond that you would need something like patch 9 but instead of adding new functions and API you would be switching things on and off via the ixgbevf_suspend/resume calls.

- Alex








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