[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 2/3 v5] Block live migration

[Jan Kiszka]

Liran Schour wrote:
> 
> Jan Kiszka <address@hidden> wrote on 26/11/2009 19:24:40:
>>>>>> +                bdrv_write(bs, (addr >> SECTOR_BITS),
>>>>>> +                           buf, block_mig_state->
> sectors_per_block);
>>>>> This synchronous write-back translates appears to be the reason for
> an
>>>>> unusable migration (or restore from snapshot) speed: about 100 KB/s
> here
>>>>> (ie. 22h for a rather small 8G guest :( ). Did you already try to
>>>>> improve this situation?
>>>> I have seen this behavior, but it seems that there is a very big
> difference
>>>> in the performance if the new block device is based on an allocated
> file
>>>> already (try the same migration to an already allocated file in the
>>>> requested size) I am trying to figure out why we see this
> behavior.(any
>>>> ideas?)
>>> Yes, much faster, more than 6 MB/s. Not really impressing, but that's
>>> now likely due to the tiny block size.
>>>
>>> That 4K also made the unallocated write so awfully slow as the image
>>> file had to be continuously extended by this amount.
>>>
>>>> Anyway we can turn the writes to be async but we have to synchronize
> all
>>>> destinations writes before completing the migration and moving the
> guest to
>>>> the destination. When the guest starts to run on the destination all
> writes
>>>> should be finished, so anyhow we need to wait synchronously to the
> writes.
>>>> I will look on this further next week.
>>> Well, we actually need these changes:
>>>  1. Reasonable block size (if we cannot overcome the cluster size, we
>>>     need to coalesce blocks on write out)
>> If I understood the logic correctly we can easily increase it during
>> phase 2, ie. while in async mode. We just need to save the block size in
>> its header if we vary it.
> 
> Right, no problem to increase the block size or to use changed block size.
> 

Yep, I'm using such a patch now: 1 MB block size already helps a lot.

>>>  2. Async write, throttled by the sync read, or both asynchronously.
>>>     Unfortunately, qemu's aio does not work yet at the point we need
>>>     it...
>>>
>>> I will also continue to dig into this.
>>>
>>> Jan
>>>
>> At this chance I realized that the length of the synchronous phase 3
>> depends on the number of dirty blocks collected during phase 2. Thus,
>> the guest downtime will increase when it is under load, ie. typically at
>> the point when the down-time must be minimal. We likely need an approach
>> that takes the number of dirty sectors into account.
> 
> True. It is in my todo list. We can do something similar to what is done
> while migrating RAM.

FYI, git://git.kiszka.org/qemu.git queues/migration contains my current
patch queue.

I was about to post, but now I'm back into debugging. The issue (EAGAIN
when reading a snapshot via "-incoming exec:'cat snapshot'") may or may
not be related to my changes. Once it's resolved, I will post
officially, but maybe you already want to have a look.

Jan

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