[Virtio-fs] [PATCH 0/4] vhost-user-fs: Internal migration

[Hanna Czenczek]

On 05.05.23 16:26, Eugenio Perez Martin wrote:
> On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 11:51 AM Hanna Czenczek <hreitz at redhat.com> wrote:
>> (By the way, thanks for the explanations :))
>>
>> On 05.05.23 11:03, Hanna Czenczek wrote:
>>> On 04.05.23 23:14, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>>>> I think it's better to change QEMU's vhost code
>>>> to leave stateful devices suspended (but not reset) across
>>>> vhost_dev_stop() -> vhost_dev_start(), maybe by introducing
>>>> vhost_dev_suspend() and vhost_dev_resume(). Have you thought about
>>>> this aspect?
>>> Yes and no; I mean, I haven’t in detail, but I thought this is what’s
>>> meant by suspending instead of resetting when the VM is stopped.
>> So, now looking at vhost_dev_stop(), one problem I can see is that
>> depending on the back-end, different operations it does will do
>> different things.
>>
>> It tries to stop the whole device via vhost_ops->vhost_dev_start(),
>> which for vDPA will suspend the device, but for vhost-user will reset it
>> (if F_STATUS is there).
>>
>> It disables all vrings, which doesn’t mean stopping, but may be
>> necessary, too.  (I haven’t yet really understood the use of disabled
>> vrings, I heard that virtio-net would have a need for it.)
>>
>> It then also stops all vrings, though, so that’s OK.  And because this
>> will always do GET_VRING_BASE, this is actually always the same
>> regardless of transport.
>>
>> Finally (for this purpose), it resets the device status via
>> vhost_ops->vhost_reset_status().  This is only implemented on vDPA, and
>> this is what resets the device there.
>>
>>
>> So vhost-user resets the device in .vhost_dev_start, but vDPA only does
>> so in .vhost_reset_status.  It would seem better to me if vhost-user
>> would also reset the device only in .vhost_reset_status, not in
>> .vhost_dev_start.  .vhost_dev_start seems precisely like the place to
>> run SUSPEND/RESUME.
>>
> I think the same. I just saw It's been proposed at [1].
>
>> Another question I have (but this is basically what I wrote in my last
>> email) is why we even call .vhost_reset_status here.  If the device
>> and/or all of the vrings are already stopped, why do we need to reset
>> it?  Naïvely, I had assumed we only really need to reset the device if
>> the guest changes, so that a new guest driver sees a freshly initialized
>> device.
>>
> I don't know why we didn't need to call it :). I'm assuming the
> previous vhost-user net did fine resetting vq indexes, using
> VHOST_USER_SET_VRING_BASE. But I don't know about more complex
> devices.
>
> The guest can reset the device, or write 0 to the PCI config status,
> at any time. How does virtiofs handle it, being stateful?

Honestly a good question because virtiofsd implements neither SET_STATUS 
nor RESET_DEVICE.  I’ll have to investigate that.

I think when the guest resets the device, SET_VRING_BASE always comes 
along some way or another, so that’s how the vrings are reset.  Maybe 
the internal state is reset only following more high-level FUSE commands 
like INIT.

Hanna