The current QEMU live migration implementation mark the all the guest's RAM pages as dirtied in the ram bulk stage, all these pages will be processed and that takes quit a lot of CPU cycles. >From guest's point of view, it doesn't care about the content in free pages. We can make use of this fact and skip processing the free pages in the ram bulk stage, it can save a lot CPU cycles and reduce the network traffic significantly while speed up the live migration process obviously. This patch set is the QEMU side implementation. The virtio-balloon is extended so that QEMU can get the free pages information from the guest through virtio. After getting the free pages information (a bitmap), QEMU can use it to filter out the guest's free pages in the ram bulk stage. This make the live migration process much more efficient. This RFC version doesn't take the post-copy and RDMA into consideration, maybe both of them can benefit from this PV solution by with some extra modifications. Performance data ================ Test environment: CPU: Intel (R) Xeon(R) CPU ES-2699 v3 @ 2.30GHz Host RAM: 64GB Host Linux Kernel: 4.2.0 Host OS: CentOS 7.1 Guest Linux Kernel: 4.5.rc6 Guest OS: CentOS 6.6 Network: X540-AT2 with 10 Gigabit connection Guest RAM: 8GB Case 1: Idle guest just boots: ============================================ | original | pv ------------------------------------------- total time(ms) | 1894 | 421 -------------------------------------------- transferred ram(KB) | 398017 | 353242 ============================================ Case 2: The guest has ever run some memory consuming workload, the workload is terminated just before live migration. ============================================ | original | pv ------------------------------------------- total time(ms) | 7436 | 552 -------------------------------------------- transferred ram(KB) | 8146291 | 361375 ============================================ Liang Li (4): pc: Add code to get the lowmem form PCMachineState virtio-balloon: Add a new feature to balloon device migration: not set migration bitmap in setup stage migration: filter out guest's free pages in ram bulk stage balloon.c | 30 ++++++++- hw/i386/pc.c | 5 ++ hw/i386/pc_piix.c | 1 + hw/i386/pc_q35.c | 1 + hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.c | 81 ++++++++++++++++++++++++- include/hw/i386/pc.h | 3 +- include/hw/virtio/virtio-balloon.h | 17 +++++- include/standard-headers/linux/virtio_balloon.h | 1 + include/sysemu/balloon.h | 10 ++- migration/ram.c | 64 +++++++++++++++---- 10 files changed, 195 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-) -- 1.8.3.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html