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Peter Xu authored
Migration bandwidth is a very important value to live migration.  It's
because it's one of the major factors that we'll make decision on when to
switchover to destination in a precopy process.

This value is currently estimated by QEMU during the whole live migration
process by monitoring how fast we were sending the data.  This can be the
most accurate bandwidth if in the ideal world, where we're always feeding
unlimited data to the migration channel, and then it'll be limited to the
bandwidth that is available.

However in reality it may be very different, e.g., over a 10Gbps network we
can see query-migrate showing migration bandwidth of only a few tens of
MB/s just because there are plenty of other things the migration thread
might be doing.  For example, the migration thread can be busy scanning
zero pages, or it can be fetching dirty bitmap from other external dirty
sources (like vhost or KVM).  It means we may not be pushing data as much
as possible to migration channel, so the bandwidth estimated from "how many
data we sent in the channel" can be dramatically inaccurate sometimes.

With that, the decision to switchover will be affected, by assuming that we
may not be able to switchover at all with such a low bandwidth, but in
reality we can.

The migration may not even converge at all with the downtime specified,
with that wrong estimation of bandwidth, keeping iterations forever with a
low estimation of bandwidth.

The issue is QEMU itself may not be able to avoid those uncertainties on
measuing the real "available migration bandwidth".  At least not something
I can think of so far.

One way to fix this is when the user is fully aware of the available
bandwidth, then we can allow the user to help providing an accurate value.

For example, if the user has a dedicated channel of 10Gbps for migration
for this specific VM, the user can specify this bandwidth so QEMU can
always do the calculation based on this fact, trusting the user as long as
specified.  It may not be the exact bandwidth when switching over (in which
case qemu will push migration data as fast as possible), but much better
than QEMU trying to wildly guess, especially when very wrong.

A new parameter "avail-switchover-bandwidth" is introduced just for this.
So when the user specified this parameter, instead of trusting the
estimated value from QEMU itself (based on the QEMUFile send speed), it
trusts the user more by using this value to decide when to switchover,
assuming that we'll have such bandwidth available then.

Note that specifying this value will not throttle the bandwidth for
switchover yet, so QEMU will always use the full bandwidth possible for
sending switchover data, assuming that should always be the most important
way to use the network at that time.

This can resolve issues like "unconvergence migration" which is caused by
hilarious low "migration bandwidth" detected for whatever reason.

Reported-by: default avatarZhiyi Guo <zhguo@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarJoao Martins <joao.m.martins@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarJuan Quintela <quintela@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJuan Quintela <quintela@redhat.com>
Message-ID: <20231010221922.40638-1-peterx@redhat.com>
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QEMU README

QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and virtualizer.

QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without any need for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xen and KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing the hypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achieve near native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it is capable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7 board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).

QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux and BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against one architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using a different architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does not involve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.

QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings. It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API. It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.

QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.

Documentation

Documentation can be found hosted online at https://www.qemu.org/documentation/. The documentation for the current development version that is available at https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/ is generated from the docs/ folder in the source tree, and is built by Sphinx.

Building

QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modern Linux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a variety of other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:

mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make

Additional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:

Submitting patches

The QEMU source code is maintained under the GIT version control system.

git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git

When submitting patches, one common approach is to use 'git format-patch' and/or 'git send-email' to format & send the mail to the qemu-devel@nongnu.org mailing list. All patches submitted must contain a 'Signed-off-by' line from the author. Patches should follow the guidelines set out in the style section of the Developers Guide.

Additional information on submitting patches can be found online via the QEMU website

The QEMU website is also maintained under source control.

git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu-web.git

A 'git-publish' utility was created to make above process less cumbersome, and is highly recommended for making regular contributions, or even just for sending consecutive patch series revisions. It also requires a working 'git send-email' setup, and by default doesn't automate everything, so you may want to go through the above steps manually for once.

For installation instructions, please go to

The workflow with 'git-publish' is:

$ git checkout master -b my-feature
$ # work on new commits, add your 'Signed-off-by' lines to each
$ git publish

Your patch series will be sent and tagged as my-feature-v1 if you need to refer back to it in the future.

Sending v2:

$ git checkout my-feature # same topic branch
$ # making changes to the commits (using 'git rebase', for example)
$ git publish

Your patch series will be sent with 'v2' tag in the subject and the git tip will be tagged as my-feature-v2.

Bug reporting

The QEMU project uses GitLab issues to track bugs. Bugs found when running code built from QEMU git or upstream released sources should be reported via:

If using QEMU via an operating system vendor pre-built binary package, it is preferable to report bugs to the vendor's own bug tracker first. If the bug is also known to affect latest upstream code, it can also be reported via GitLab.

For additional information on bug reporting consult:

ChangeLog

For version history and release notes, please visit https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/ or look at the git history for more detailed information.

Contact

The QEMU community can be contacted in a number of ways, with the two main methods being email and IRC

Information on additional methods of contacting the community can be found online via the QEMU website: