[libvirt] Introducing Fabian Freyer (GSoC 2016 student)

Michal Privoznik mprivozn at redhat.com
Thu May 5 15:54:21 UTC 2016


On 04.05.2016 13:50, Roman Bogorodskiy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to introduce Fabian Freyer (CCed), he's taking part in Google
> Support of Code this year within FreeBSD organization and his project is
> called "Improving libvirt support for bhyve".

Hey, that's awesome! I wasn't aware that somebody outside libvirt GSoC
org is actually intending to work on libvirt.

> 
> Below I'm sharing a tentative plan we currently have. Or, to be more
> specific, it's a list of ideas for the bhyve driver with things were
> implementation is clear going first, followed by items were some
> additional research and working on approach needed. There's no goal to
> implement everything from this list though.
> 
> This list was assembled by Fabian with some minor edits from me.
> 
> Suggestions and ideas are very welcome.
> 
> ---
> 
> The primary aim of this project is to implement missing calls and
> functionality in the libvirt bhyve driver. According to the libvirt API
> Support Matrix [1], there are a large number of calls not yet implemented. While
> some missing API calls are not applicable to bhyve, a number of them are,
> among them the following calls:
> 
>  General calls:
> 
>   - virConnectDomainXMLFromNative
>     This would mostly be an argument parser for a bhyve(8) and bhyvectl(8)
> command line.
>   - virConnectGetCPUModelNames
>     This needs a research: bhyve is not very flexible in configuration of
>     what CPU model is exposed to the guest, need to figure out if that’s
>     worth implementing now. 
> 
>  Connection calls: 
>    
>    Most of these include some form of authentication handling and are
> therefore not applicable. However, the following do apply to bhyve and are
> easy to implement:
> 
>   - virConnectGetType
>     Trivially return “BHYVE”
>   - virConnectIsAlive
>     Trivially return 1, since “A connection will be classed as
>     alive if it is [...] local” and /dev/vmm is local. 
>   - virConnectIsEncrypted
>     Trivially return 0, since bhyve does not support encrypted interfaces.
> 
>  General Domain calls:
> 
>   - virDomainGetMaxMemory
>     Since bhyve does not support memory ballooning, just
>     return the amount of memory allocated here
>   - virDomainGetMaxVcpus, virDomainGetVcpus
>     Would use the approach described in this mailing list
>     thread: “Until the vCPU state is exposed by bhyvectl, or we provide a
>     sysctl, you can use heuristics: the number of vCPU threads for the bhyve
>     process, or scan all vCPUs and only count those that have a non-zero RIP.” [2]
>   - virDomainGetCPUStats
>   - virDomainGetTime
>   - virDomainInjectNMI
>     Call bhyvectl --inject-nmi
>   - virDomainReset
>     Reset a bhyve VM with ‘bhyvectl --force-reset’ and then clean things up
>     using bhyvectl --destroy; update bhyve monitor code to handle exit
>     code 0 from bhyve(8) that’s corresponding to reset (0 - reset
>     / reboot, 1 - shutdown, 2 - halt) to trigger re-starting of the VM.

My knowledge of the bhyve is very limited, but isn't --force-reset just
enough? Or it is merely just sending the request to the hypervisor and
then we have to lurk for actual request execution?

>   - virDomainReboot

Michal




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