On Friday, June 29, 2018 10:46 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > To: David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> > Cc: Wang, Wei W <wei.w.wang@xxxxxxxxx>; virtio-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; > linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; > kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; linux-mm@xxxxxxxxx; mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx; > akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; > pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx; liliang.opensource@xxxxxxxxx; > yang.zhang.wz@xxxxxxxxx; quan.xu0@xxxxxxxxx; nilal@xxxxxxxxxx; > riel@xxxxxxxxxx; peterx@xxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: [PATCH v34 0/4] Virtio-balloon: support free page reporting > > On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 01:06:32PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote: > > On 25.06.2018 14:05, Wei Wang wrote: > > > This patch series is separated from the previous "Virtio-balloon > > > Enhancement" series. The new feature, > > > VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_FREE_PAGE_HINT, implemented by this series > enables > > > the virtio-balloon driver to report hints of guest free pages to the > > > host. It can be used to accelerate live migration of VMs. Here is an > introduction of this usage: > > > > > > Live migration needs to transfer the VM's memory from the source > > > machine to the destination round by round. For the 1st round, all > > > the VM's memory is transferred. From the 2nd round, only the pieces > > > of memory that were written by the guest (after the 1st round) are > > > transferred. One method that is popularly used by the hypervisor to > > > track which part of memory is written is to write-protect all the guest > memory. > > > > > > This feature enables the optimization by skipping the transfer of > > > guest free pages during VM live migration. It is not concerned that > > > the memory pages are used after they are given to the hypervisor as > > > a hint of the free pages, because they will be tracked by the > > > hypervisor and transferred in the subsequent round if they are used and > written. > > > > > > * Tests > > > - Test Environment > > > Host: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20GHz > > > Guest: 8G RAM, 4 vCPU > > > Migration setup: migrate_set_speed 100G, migrate_set_downtime 2 > > > second > > > > > > - Test Results > > > - Idle Guest Live Migration Time (results are averaged over 10 runs): > > > - Optimization v.s. Legacy = 284ms vs 1757ms --> ~84% reduction > > > - Guest with Linux Compilation Workload (make bzImage -j4): > > > - Live Migration Time (average) > > > Optimization v.s. Legacy = 1402ms v.s. 2528ms --> ~44% reduction > > > - Linux Compilation Time > > > Optimization v.s. Legacy = 5min6s v.s. 5min12s > > > --> no obvious difference > > > > > > > Being in version 34 already, this whole thing still looks and feels > > like a big hack to me. It might just be me, but especially if I read > > about assumptions like "QEMU will not hotplug memory during > > migration". This does not feel like a clean solution. > > > > I am still not sure if we really need this interface, especially as > > real free page hinting might be on its way. > > > > a) we perform free page hinting by setting all free pages > > (arch_free_page()) to zero. Migration will detect zero pages and > > minimize #pages to migrate. I don't think this is a good idea but > > Michel suggested to do a performance evaluation and Nitesh is looking > > into that right now. > > Yes this test is needed I think. If we can get most of the benefit without PV > interfaces, that's nice. > > Wei, I think you need this as part of your performance comparison > too: set page poisoning value to 0 and enable KSM, compare with your > patches. Do you mean live migration with zero pages? I can first share the amount of memory transferred during live migration I saw, Legacy is around 380MB, Optimization is around 340MB. This proves that most pages have already been 0 and skipped during the legacy live migration. But the legacy time is still much larger because zero page checking is costly. (It's late night here, I can get you that with my server probably tomorrow) Best, Wei
