From: "Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>
To: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Cc: "Michal Prívozník" <mprivozn@redhat.com>,
"Igor Mammedov" <imammedo@redhat.com>,
qemu-devel@nongnu.org, "Paolo Bonzini" <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] qmp: Stabilize preconfig
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2021 09:27:11 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <YYJV3ZIA7kNaqORB@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87zgqlzmxi.fsf@dusky.pond.sub.org>
On Wed, Nov 03, 2021 at 09:02:49AM +0100, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:
>
> > On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 03:37:58PM +0100, Michal Prívozník wrote:
> >> On 10/25/21 2:19 PM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> >> > Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com> writes:
> >> >
> >> >> The -preconfig option and exit-preconfig command are around for
> >> >> quite some time now. However, they are still marked as unstable.
> >> >> This is suboptimal because it may block some upper layer in
> >> >> consuming it. In this specific case - Libvirt avoids using
> >> >> experimental features.
> >> >>
> >> >> Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
> >> >
> >> > If I remember correctly, the motivation for -preconfig was NUMA
> >> > configuration via QMP. More uses may have appeared since.
> >> >
> >> > Back then, I questioned the need for yet another option and yet another
> >> > state: why not -S?
> >> >
> >> > The answer boiled down to
> >> >
> >> > 0. Yes, having just one would be a simpler and cleaner interface, but
> >> >
> >> > 1. the godawful mess QEMU startup has become makes -S unsuitable for
> >> > some things we want to do, so we need -preconfig,
> >> >
> >> > 2. which is in turn unsuitable for other things we want to do, so we
> >> > still need -S".
> >> >
> >> > 3. Cleaning up the mess to the point where "simpler and cleaner" becomes
> >> > viable again is not in the cards right now.
> >>
> >> I see a difference between the two. -preconfig starts QEMU in such a way
> >> that its configuration can still be changed (in my particular use case
> >> vCPUs can be assigned to NUMA nodes), while -S does not allow that. If
> >> we had one state for both, then some commands must be forbidden from
> >> executing as soon as 'cont' is issued. Moreover, those commands would
> >> need to do much more than they are doing now (e.g. regenerate ACPI table
> >> after each run). Subsequently, validating configuration would need to be
> >> postponed until the first 'cont' because with just one state QEMU can't
> >> know when the last config command was issued.
>
> Doesn't all this apply to x-exit-preconfig already?
>
> * Some commands are only allowed before x-exit-preconfig,
> e.g. set-numa-node.
>
> * The complete (pre-)configuration is only available at
> x-exit-preconfig. In particular, ACPI tables can be fixed only then.
>
> >> Having said all of that, I'm not sure if -preconfig is the way to go or
> >> we want to go the other way. I don't have a strong opinion.
> >
> > It feels like the scenario here is really just a specialization of the
> > more general problem we want to be able to solve. Namely, we want to be
> > able to start a bare QEMU and configure it entirely on the fly. IOW, we
> > are really targetting for -preconfig to be able to do /all/ configuration,
> > and with a new ELF binary, at which point -preconfig wouldn't exist, it
> > would be the implicit default.
>
> Whether -preconfig is the default or an option doesn't matter for
> discussing the state machine.
>
> > Libvirt primarily uses -S because it needs to query various aspects of
> > QEMU's config before CPUs start executing, while QEMU can still be
> > considered trustworthy (as it hasn't executed untrusted guest code
> > yet). eg we query vCPU PIDs so that we can apply CPU pinning to them.
> > We query the CPU model features so we can reflect what exact CPU
> > features we got from KVM. There are various other examples.
>
> Which of the queries you need work only between x-exit-preconfig and -S?
Well before x-exit-preconfig, QMP only permits a very small number
of commands - QEMU has loosened that up a bit, but I don't think anyone
has checked whether there's enough to cover libvirt's current usage yet.
> Which of them could be made to work before x-exit-preconfig?
Quite a few i expect.
> > The secondary reason we use -S is that sometimes the mgmt app does
> > not actually want the guest CPUs to start running - they actively
> > want it in a paused state initially and will manually start CPUs
> > later. One reason is to enable them to open the serial console
> > backend before CPUs start, to guarantee that no console output is
> > lost in that small startup window. This is really the original
> > purpose of -S. This doesn't imply a need for -S. I'd say that
> > -preconfig should essentially imply -S by default. If you're
> > already doing lots of things via QMP, being required to issue
> > a 'cont' command is no hardship.
>
> I wonder whether we really have to step through three states
>
> x-exit-preconfig cont
> preconfig ---> pre run ---> run
>
> and not two
>
> cont
> pre run ---> run
Looking at it from POV of configuration we have two states, with
a unidirectional transition permitted
unconfigured ---> configured
Then from the POV of guest CPUs we have two states, with a
bi-directional transition permitted.
stopped <-----> running
During QEMU start process we have two end goals we need to satisfy
* configured + running (the 95+% common case)
* configured + stopped (the rarer case)
So in terms of QEMU internal state transitions it feels like we do
likely need to distinguish pre-config separately from stopped, but
from a CLI arg POV I think it is redundant to distinguish them as
"stopped" can be reasonably implied as a default
Regards,
Daniel
--
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-11-03 9:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-10-25 11:08 [PATCH] qmp: Stabilize preconfig Michal Privoznik
2021-10-25 12:19 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-10-25 17:01 ` Paolo Bonzini
2021-11-01 14:37 ` Michal Prívozník
2021-11-01 14:57 ` Daniel P. Berrangé
2021-11-03 8:02 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-11-03 9:27 ` Daniel P. Berrangé [this message]
2021-11-10 12:54 ` Michal Prívozník
2021-11-10 13:23 ` Damien Hedde
2021-11-10 21:56 ` Paolo Bonzini
2021-11-11 6:11 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-11-11 8:15 ` Paolo Bonzini
2021-11-11 14:37 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-11-11 19:22 ` Paolo Bonzini
2021-11-12 11:48 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-11-12 22:18 ` Paolo Bonzini
2021-11-13 7:52 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-11-15 12:37 ` Paolo Bonzini
2021-11-15 15:40 ` Markus Armbruster
2021-11-16 6:50 ` Paolo Bonzini
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