[libvirt] [RFC] require for suggestions on support for ivshmem device

[Martin Kletzander]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:17:32AM +0200, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 08:23:21AM +0000, Wangrui (K) wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>Libvirt does not support ivshmem(Inter-VM Shared Memory) device recently,
>>thus, I would like to know if there's any plan to support it in the future?
>>If not, I would like to contribute a serial of patches to do so.
>>

I came back to this mail right now because I need to have this
implemented.  Is there any progress on your side with this or should I
try hitting this?

[...]
>>There are two ways to use ivshmem with qemu
>>(please refer to http://qemu.weilnetz.de/qemu-doc.html#pcsys_005fother_005fdevs ):
>>1.Guests map a POSIX shared memory region into the guest as a PCI device
>>that enables zero-copy communication to the application level of the guests, The basic syntax is:
>>
>>  qemu-system-i386-device ivshmem, size = <size in format accepted by -m> [, shm = <shm name>]
>>
>>2.If desired, interrupts can be sent between guest VMs accessing the same shared memory region.
>>Interrupt support requires using a shared memory server and using a chardev socket to connect to it.
>>An example syntax when using the shared memory server is:
>>
>>  qemu-system-i386-device ivshmem, size = <size in format accepted by -m> [, chardev = <id>] [, msi = on]
>>                               [, ioeventfd = on] [, vectors = n] [, role = peer | master]
>>  qemu-system-i386-chardev socket, path = <path>, id = <id>
>>
>>The respective xml configuration for the above 2 qemu command lines are shown as below:
>>
>>Example1: automatically attach device with KVM
>>
>>  <devices>
>>    <ivshmem role='master'>
>>      <memory name='dom-ivshmem' size='2'/>
>>    </ivshmem>
>>  </devices>
>>
>>NOTE: "size" means ivshmem size in unit MB, "name" means shm name
>>      "role" is optional, it may be set to "master" or "peer", the default one is "master"
>>
>
>What do these roles mean, I mean what's the difference between master
>and peer and why is it only used with the chardev?  Does it mean
>master can only send interrupts or...?  Just curious.
>

@Cam (Cc'd) I was wondering about the role= options, so I looked into
the code.  It looks like role=peer just effectively disables
migration.  Did I miss any other difference?

From the libvirt's POV I'd have a few more questions if I may.  How
does the migration work (if there's role=master) WRT other guests
using the same shm?  I found no shm_unlink call in QEMU sources (but
again, I'm not experienced in QEMU's internals), does that mean that
cleanup should be done by libvirt?

Thank you for any info provided.

Martin
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