Add option to skip cpu feature and model verification in libvirt and rely on qemu 'enforce' option

[manish.mishra]

On 18/11/22 5:00 pm, Jiri Denemark wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 10:18:59 +0000, John Levon wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 10:52:32AM +0100, Jiri Denemark wrote:
>>
>>>>    * Qemu already provide an option 'enforce' to validate if features
>>>>    with which vm is started is exactly same as one provided and nothing
>>>>    is silently dropped.
>>> Right, but it's not enough. In addition to removed features libvirt also
>>> checks for unexpectedly added features. And you really need to do both.
>>> Because if you ask for -cpu Model,feat1=on,feat2=on,enforce and QEMU
>>> says everything is fine, the guest might see more than what you asked.
>>> For example, if a feature is enabled only if a host supports it you may
>>> or may not get it without any complains from QEMU. But if you get it you
>>> really need to explicitly ask for it during migration, otherwise the
>>> feature can just silently disappear. Of course, this would be a really
>>> bad behavior from QEMU, but that does not mean it can't happen (I think
>>> SVM is a bit problematic in this way) and the whole point of libvirt's
>>> checks is to prevent this kind of issues.
>> Hi Jiri, I'm not following this very well. I think you're saying that qemu has
>> had bugs previously where features get silently enabled,
> Personally, I haven't actually witnessed any bug in this area (as far as
> I can remember, which is not that far :-)), but got some reports of at
> least one, even though without any proof.
>
> Specifically, SVM is quite strange as it is included in all AMD CPU
> models in QEMU and yet if you try to start it on a host without nesting
> enabled "enforce" does not complain. I saw the feature is enabled with
> older machine types, but I was told the magic behind this feature looks
> like not only machine type but even host configuration itself is
> involved. Anyway, although I saw reports of that the feature could be
> enabled without an explicit request even with new machine types I still
> haven't seen any proof of this happening. So I hope it just does not
> happen and users are only afraid of this possibility.
>
>> and it's libvirt's job/role to paper over those issues? Do you have
>> some specific cases of this?
> This is not about papering. It's actually the opposite, that is about
> detecting if something like this happens and reporting it as a failure
> rather than papering it and hoping everything goes well. So I think
> doing this is a good idea even though I don't think we actually saw any
> issue of this kind.


Hi Jiri, I see now with libvirt master, with check=='full' we verify both silently dropped as well as added features. But as you already stated Qemu silently adding feature is a Qemu bug and libvirt just reports that bug, so it should be very unlikely, i agree that is not a good reasoning :). Our requirement is that we want to use CPU Models and features which are defined in Qemu but not in libvirt for e.g if we want to use Icelake-Server-V4 directly or newly added vmx feature, libvirt does not allow. Currently we take help of qemu to do validations but for cpu feature verfication and model definations we still use libvirt defined definations which prevent us to use anything which is not defined in libvirt. I see there are already efforts going on to get all model and feature defination from qemu itself, but not sure how much time it will take. Till that happens we thought safest option is to have an option to remove all validations from libvirt and rely on qemu 'enforce' for 
migration safetly. I understand qemu-enforce does not check for silently added features, but that case we can assume is very unlikely and Qemu should fix otherwise VMs will not poweron anyway with check=='full'. Basically we want it as an modification of check='none' but also skipping things like virCPUValidateFeatures and passing option 'enforce' to Qemu. Or if silently adding features is that big concern we can have a check in Qemu itself? I understand current qemu-enforce is not as migration safe as check=='full' but probably suitable for our use case for time being?

Thanks

Manish Mishra

>
> Jirka
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/attachments/20221121/bc32d6c7/attachment.htm>