On 11/16/2009 04:18 PM, Fernando Luis Vázquez Cao wrote:
Avi Kivity wrote:
On 11/09/2009 05:53 AM, Fernando Luis Vázquez Cao wrote:
Kemari runs paired virtual machines in an active-passive configuration
and achieves whole-system replication by continuously copying the
state of the system (dirty pages and the state of the virtual devices)
from the active node to the passive node. An interesting implication
of this is that during normal operation only the active node is
actually executing code.
Can you characterize the performance impact for various workloads? I
assume you are running continuously in log-dirty mode. Doesn't this
make memory intensive workloads suffer?
Yes, we're running continuously in log-dirty mode.
We still do not have numbers to show for KVM, but
the snippets below from several runs of lmbench
using Xen+Kemari will give you an idea of what you
can expect in terms of overhead. All the tests were
run using a fully virtualized Debian guest with
hardware nested paging enabled.
fork exec sh P/F C/S [us]
------------------------------------------------------
Base 114 349 1197 1.2845 8.2
Kemari(10GbE) + FC 141 403 1280 1.2835 11.6
Kemari(10GbE) + DRBD 161 415 1388 1.3145 11.6
Kemari(1GbE) + FC 151 410 1335 1.3370 11.5
Kemari(1GbE) + DRBD 162 413 1318 1.3239 11.6
* P/F=page fault, C/S=context switch
The benchmarks above are memory intensive and, as you
can see, the overhead varies widely from 7% to 40%.
We also measured CPU bound operations, but, as expected,
Kemari incurred almost no overhead.
Is lmbench fork that memory intensive?
Do you have numbers for benchmarks that use significant anonymous RSS?
Say, a parallel kernel build.
Note that scaling vcpus will increase a guest's memory-dirtying power
but snapshot rate will not scale in the same way.
- Notification to qemu: Taking a page from live migration's
playbook, the synchronization process is user-space driven, which
means that qemu needs to be woken up at each synchronization
point. That is already the case for qemu-emulated devices, but we
also have in-kernel emulators. To compound the problem, even for
user-space emulated devices accesses to coalesced MMIO areas can
not be detected. As a consequence we need a mechanism to
communicate KVM-handled events to qemu.
Do you mean the ioapic, pic, and lapic?
Well, I was more worried about the in-kernel backends currently in the
works. To save the state of those devices we could leverage qemu's
vmstate
infrastructure and even reuse struct VMStateDescription's pre_save()
callback, but we would like to pass the device state through the kvm_run
area to avoid a ioctl call right after returning to user space.
Hm, let's defer all that until we have something working so we can
estimate the impact of userspace virtio in those circumstances.
Why is access to those chips considered a synchronization point?
The main problem with those is that to get the chip state we
use an ioctl when we could have copied it to qemu's memory
before going back to user space. Not all accesses to those chips
need to be treated as synchronization points.
Ok. Note that piggybacking on an exit will work for the lapic, but not
for the global irqchips (ioapic, pic) since they can still be modified
by another vcpu.
I wonder if you can pipeline dirty memory synchronization. That is,
write-protect those pages that are dirty, start copying them to the
other side, and continue execution, copying memory if the guest
faults it again.
Asynchronous transmission of dirty pages would be really helpful to
eliminate the performance hiccups that tend to occur at synchronization
points. What we can do is to copy dirty pages asynchronously until we
reach
a synchronization point, where we need to stop the guest and send the
remaining dirty pages and the state of devices to the other side.
However, we can not delay the transmission of a dirty page across a
synchronization point, because if the primary node crashed before the
page reached the fallback node the I/O operation that caused the
synchronization point cannot be replayed reliably.
What I mean is:
- choose synchronization point A
- start copying memory for synchronization point A
- output is delayed
- choose synchronization point B
- copy memory for A and B
if guest touches memory not yet copied for A, COW it
- once A copying is complete, release A output
- continue copying memory for B
- choose synchronization point B
by keeping two synchronization points active, you don't have any
pauses. The cost is maintaining copy-on-write so we can copy dirty
pages for A while keeping execution.
How many pages do you copy per synchronization point for reasonably
difficult workloads?
That is very workload-dependent, but if you take a look at the examples
below you can get a feeling of how Kemari behaves.
IOzone Kemari sync interval[ms] dirtied pages
---------------------------------------------------------
buffered + fsync 400 3000
O_SYNC 10 80
In summary, if the guest executes few I/O operations, the interval
between Kemari synchronizations points will increase and the number of
dirtied pages will grow accordingly.
In the example above, the externally observed latency grows to 400 ms, yes?
--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function
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