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

From: Alexander Duyck
Date: Fri Oct 23 2015 - 16:01:30 EST


On 10/23/2015 12:05 PM, Alex Williamson wrote:
On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 11:36 -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:
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.

I'd be concerned that an emulated IOMMU on the DMA path would reduce
throughput to the point where we shouldn't even bother with assigning
the device in the first place and should be using virtio-net instead.
POWER systems have a guest visible IOMMU and it's been challenging for
them to get to 10Gbps, requiring real-mode tricks. virtio-net may add
some latency, but it's not that hard to get it to 10Gbps and it already
supports migration. An emulated IOMMU in the guest is really only good
for relatively static mappings, the latency for anything else is likely
too high. Maybe there are shadow page table tricks that could help, but
it's imposing overhead the whole time the guest is running, not only on
migration. Thanks,


The big overhead I have seen with IOMMU implementations is the fact that they almost always have some sort of locked table or tree that prevents multiple CPUs from accessing resources in any kind of timely fashion. As a result things like Tx is usually slowed down for network workloads when multiple CPUs are enabled.

I admit doing a guest visible IOMMU would probably add some overhead, but this current patch set as implemented already has some of the hints of that as the descriptor rings are locked which means we cannot unmap in the Tx clean-up while we are mapping on another Tx queue for instance.

One approach for this would be to implement or extend a lightweight DMA API such as swiotlb or nommu. The code would need to have a bit in there so it can take care of marking the pages as dirty on sync_for_cpu and unmap calls when set for BIDIRECTIONAL or FROM_DEVICE. Then if we could somehow have some mechanism for the hypervisor to tell us when the feature is needed or not we could probably drop the overhead for page dirtying as well. That was why I even mentioned IOMMU, but the fact is all we really need is some means of tracking if we should be marking the pages as dirty or not.

- Alex
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