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Re: [Qemu-devel] [libvirt] [PATCH RFC 0/4] Allow hibernation on guests


From: Michael Roth
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [libvirt] [PATCH RFC 0/4] Allow hibernation on guests
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:43:42 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111109 Thunderbird/3.1.16

On 01/30/2012 08:44 AM, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:54:56 -0600
Anthony Liguori<address@hidden>  wrote:

On 01/30/2012 06:57 AM, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
On Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:57:01 -0600
Anthony Liguori<address@hidden>   wrote:

On 01/26/2012 01:35 PM, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
On Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:18:03 -0700
Eric Blake<address@hidden>    wrote:

[adding qemu-devel]

On 01/26/2012 07:46 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
One thing, that you'll probably notice is this
'set-support-level' command. Basically, it tells GA what qemu version
is it running on. Ideally, this should be done as soon as
GA starts up. However, that cannot be determined from outside
world as GA doesn't emit any events yet.
Ideally^2 this command should be left out as it should be qemu
who tells its own agent this kind of information.
Anyway, I was going to call this command in qemuProcess{Startup,
Reconnect,Attach}, but it won't work. We need to un-pause guest CPUs
so guest can boot and start GA, but that implies returning from qemuProcess*.

So I am setting this just before 'guest-suspend' command, as
there is one more thing about GA. It is unable to remember anything
upon its restart (GA process). Which has BTW show flaw
in our current code with FS freeze&    thaw. If we freeze guest
FS, and somebody restart GA, the simple FS Thaw will not succeed as
GA thinks FS are not frozen. But that's a different cup of tea.

Because of what written above, we need to call set-level
on every suspend.


IMHO all this says that the 'set-level' command is a conceptually
unfixably broken design&    should be killed in QEMU before it turns
into an even bigger mess.

Can you elaborate on this? Michal and I talked on irc about making the
compatibility level persistent, would that help?

Once we're in a situation where we need to call 'set-level' prior
to every single invocation, you might as well just allow the QEMU
version number to be passed in directly as an arg to the command
you are running directly thus avoiding this horrificness.

Qemu folks, would you care to chime in on this?

Exactly how is the set-level command supposed to work?  As I understand
it, the goal is that if the guest has qemu-ga 1.1 installed, but is
being run by qemu 1.0, then we want to ensure that any guest agent
command supported by qemu-ga 1.1 but requiring features of qemu not
present in qemu 1.0 will be properly rejected.

Not exactly, the default support of qemu-ga is qemu 1.0. This means that by
default qemu-ga will only support qemu 1.0 even when running on qemu 2.0. This
way the set-support-level command allows you to specify that qemu 2.0 features
are supported.

Version numbers are meaningless.  What happens when a bunch of features get
backported by RHEL such that qemu-ga 1.0 ends up being a frankenstein version of
2.0?

The feature negotiation mechanism we have in QMP is the existence of a command.
    If we're in a position where we're trying to disable part of a command, it
simply means that we should have multiple commands such that we can just remove
the disabled part entirely.

You may have a point that we shouldn't be using the version number for that,
but just switching to multiple commands doesn't solve the fundamental problem.

The fundamental problem is that, S3 in current (and old) qemu has two known 
bugs:

   1. The screen is left black after S3 (it's a bug in seabios)
   2. QEMU resumes the guest immediately (Gerd posted patches to address this)

We're going to address both issues in 1.1. However, if qemu-ga is installed in
an old qemu and S3 is used, the bugs will be triggered.

It's a management tool problem.

Before a management tool issues a command, it should query the existence of the
command to determine whether this version of QEMU has that capability.  If the
tool needs to use two commands, it should query the existence of both of them.

In this case, the management tool needs a qemu-ga command *and* a QEMU command
(to resume from suspend) so it should query both of them.

Obviously, we wouldn't have a resume-from-suspend command in QEMU unless it S3
worked in QEMU as expected.

That's right, it's a coincidence, but I don't see why this wouldn't work.

I think we should do the following then:

  1. Drop the set-support-level command
  2. Split the guest-suspend command into guest-suspend-ram, 
guest-suspend-hybrid,
     guest-suspend-disk
  3. Libvirt should query for _QEMU_'s 'wakeup' command before issuing
     the guest-suspend-ram command

Michal, Michael, do you agree?

Yup yup, looks sound to me.


Alternatively, if there really was no reason to have a resume-from-suspend
command, this would be the point where we would add a capabilities command
adding the "working-s3" capability.

But with capabilities, this is a direct QEMU->management tool interaction, not a
proxy through the guest agent.

We shouldn't trust the guest agent and we certainly don't want to rely on the
guest agent to avoid sending an improper command to QEMU!  That would be a
security issue.

Fair enough, although that makes me wonder if the planned feature of pulling
qemu-ga's commands into the QMP namespace won't have similar security issues.



We need a way for qemu-ga to query qemu about the existence of a working S3
support. The set-support-level solves that.

qemu-ga is not an entry point for QEMU features.  It's strictly a mechanism to
ask the guest to do something.  If we need to interact with QEMU directly to
query a capability and/or presence of a command, then we should talk to QEMU
directly.

To put it another way, a management tool MUST deal with the fact that when
issuing the suspend-to-ram command, a guest may ignore it or attempt to do
something malicious.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori


Another option would be to disable (or enable) S3 by default in qemu-ga, and let
the admin enable (or disable it) according to S3 support being fixed in qemu.








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