On 1/6/21 8:13 AM, Erik Skultety wrote:
On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 08:00:52AM -0300, Daniel Henrique Barboza wrote:
On 1/6/21 7:09 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Tue, Jan 05, 2021 at 05:18:13PM -0300, Daniel Henrique Barboza wrote:
Hi,
This is something I've been giving a thought after working in Gitlab issue
#72 and decided to run through the ML before hitting the code.
We don't have an easy way to retrieve the domain that is using an specific
hostdev. Let's say that I want to know which domain is using the PCI card
pci_0000_01_00_2. 'nodedev-dumpxml' will return the hardware/driver capabilities
of the device, such as IOMMU group, driver and so on, but will not inform
which domain is using the hostdev, if any. 'nodedev-list' will simply list
all nodedev names known to Libvirt, without outputting any other information.
IIUC, the only existing way I can reliably tell whether a hostdev is being
used by domain, aside from having to register the information by myself
during domain definition of course, is via 'virsh dumpxml <domain>' each
existing running domain and matching the nodedev name with the source.address
element of the XML.
When we consider SR-IOV devices that can have 28+ VFs each (and have lots of
fun caveats, like Github #72 showed us), the capability of hot plug/unplug
hostdevs freely, and lots of running domains, it is clear that we're putting a
considerable pressure in the upper layers (OVirt, or a poor human admin) to
keep track of the nodedevs each running domain is using. An info that we
already have internally and can just expose it.
I have a few ideas to make this happen:
1 - upgrade 'nodedev-list' to add an extra 'assigned to' column
This is the more straightforward way of exposing the info. A simple 'nodedev-list'
call can retrieve which domain is using which nodedev. To preserve the existing
usage we can add an "--show-assigned-domains" option to control whether we
will display this info.
That would mean nodedev-list has to fetch XML for every running guest
and parse and extract it. That's not a scalable solution.
2 - add an '<assigned_to>' element in nodedev XML definition
I'm not a fan of exposing this in this particular XML because we would mix
host/hw related attributes with domain info. But it would be easier to pull
this off comparing to (1), so I'm mentioning it for the record.
This is similar to what we do for the nwfilter-binding and net-port XML
where we have an <owner> element present.
The complication here is that right now we don't ever touch the nodedev
driver when doing host device assignment, and so don't especially want
to introduce a dependancy.
One possible alternative would be a new API that operates on hostdevs instead
of nodedevs. "hostdev-list" would list the devices assigned to any domain, as
opposed to "nodedev-list" that lists all nodedevs of the host. I'm not sure if this
differentiation between hostdev and nodedev (i.e. hostdev is a nodedev that is
assigned to a domain) would be clear enough to users though. We would need to
document it clearer in the docs.
Wasn't this about the connection to the nodedev though? E.g. with mdevs we only
have a UUID in the domain XML which doesn't tell you anything about the device
nor its parent and you also can't take the uuid and try finding the
corresponding nodedev entry for it (well, you can hack it so that you construct
the resulting nodedev name). Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the use case
though.
This particular case I'm asking for comments is related to PCI hostdevs (namely,
SR-IOV virtual functions) that might get removed from the host, while being
assigned to a running domain. We don't support that (albeit I posted patches
that tries to alleviate the issue in Libvirt), and at the same time we don't
provide easy tools for the user to check whether a specific hostdev is
assigned to a domain. The user must query the running domains to find out.
About mdevs, isn't a mdev device created on demand via hypercalls to the physical
device driver, and threw away after use, the only real device being the parent?
I'm not sure whether there is a use case/requirement for knowing the parent
nodedev device. The parent device can be retrieved via sysfs AFAIC.
Thanks,
DHB
Erik
Yet another alternative is a new API under "Device Commands". We already have
attach-device, detach-device and so on, might as well have a new "list-devices"
that does the deed. This fits with the "The following commands manipulate
devices associated to domains." claim that we make about this class of commands.
Thanks,
DHB
Regards,
Daniel
