Re: [Qemu-devel] safety of migration_bitmap_extend

[Juan Quintela]

"Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>   I'm trying to understand why migration_bitmap_extend is correct/safe;
> If I understand correctly, you're arguing that:
>
>   1) the migration_bitmap_mutex around the extend, stops any sync's happening
>      and so no new bits will be set during the extend.
>
>   2) If migration sends a page and clears a bitmap entry, it doesn't
>      matter if we lose the 'clear' because we're copying it as
>      we extend it, because losing the clear just means the page
>      gets resent, and so the data is OK.
>
> However, doesn't (2) mean that migration_dirty_pages might be wrong?
> If a page was sent, the bit cleared, and migration_dirty_pages decremented,
> then if we copy over that bitmap and 'set' that bit again then 
> migration_dirty_pages
> is too small; that means that either migration would finish too early,
> or more likely, migration_dirty_pages would wrap-around -ve and
> never finish.
>
> Is there a reason it's really safe?

No.  It is reasonably safe.  Various values of reasonably.

migration_dirty_pages should never arrive at values near zero.  Because
we move to the completion stage way before it gets a value near zero.
(We could have very, very bad luck, as in it is not safe).

Now, do we really care if migration_dirty_pages is exact?  Not really,
we just use it to calculate if we should start the throotle or not.
That only test that each 1 second, so if we have written a couple of
pages that we are not accounting for, things should be reasonably safe.

Once told that, I don't know why we didn't catch that problem during
review (yes, I am guilty here).  Not sure how to really fix it,
thought.  I think that the problem is more theoretical than real, but
....

Thanks, Juan.

>
> Dave
>
> --
> Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK