On 08/08/2011 09:23 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
On 08/08/2011 05:15 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:If we did .so plugins, which I'm really not opposed to, I'd want the interface to be something like: typedef struct MigrationTransportClass { ssize_t (*writev)(MigrationTransport *obj, struct iovec *iov, int iovcnt); } MigrationTransportClass; I think it's useful to use an interface like this because it makes it easy to put the transport in a dedicated thread that didn't hold qemu_mutex (which is sort of equivalent to using a fork'd helper but is zero-copy at the expense of less isolation).If we have a shared object helper, the thread should be maintained by qemu proper, not the plugin. I wouldn't call it "migration transport", but instead a compression/decompression plugin. I don't think it merits a plugin at all though. There's limited scope for compression and it best sits in qemu proper. If anything, it needs to be more integrated (for example turning itself off if it doesn't match enough).
That adds a tremendous amount of complexity to QEMU. If we're going to change our compression algorithm, we would need to use a single algorithm that worked well for a wide variety of workloads.
We struggle enough with migration as it is, it only would get worse if we have 10 different algorithms that we were dynamically enabling/disabling.
The other option is to allow 1-off compression algorithms in the form of plugins. I think in this case, plugins are a pretty good compromise in terms of isolating complexity while allowing something that at least works very well for one particular type of workload.
Regards, Anthony Liguori -- libvir-list mailing list libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list