Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 5/5] vifo: introduce new VFIO ioctl VFIO_DEVICE_PCI_GET_DIRTY_BITMAP

[Alex Williamson]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:10:59 +0000
"Tian, Kevin" <address@hidden> wrote:

> > From: Alex Williamson [mailto:address@hidden
> > Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2017 12:00 AM 
> > Thanks Kevin.  So really it's not really a dirty bitmap, it's just a
> > bitmap of pages that the device has access to and may have dirtied.
> > Don't we have this more generally in the vfio type1 IOMMU backend?  For
> > a mediated device, we know all the pages that the vendor driver has
> > asked to be pinned.  Should we perhaps make this interface on the vfio
> > container rather than the device?  Any mediated device can provide this
> > level of detail without specific vendor support.  If we had DMA page
> > faulting, this would be the natural place to put it as well, so maybe
> > we should design the interface there to support everything similarly.
> > Thanks,
> >   
> 
> That's a nice idea. Just two comments:
> 
> 1) If some mediated device has its own way to construct true dirty
> bitmap (not thru DMA page faulting), the interface is better designed
> to allow that flexibility. Maybe an optional callback if not registered
> then use common type1 IOMMU logic otherwise prefers to vendor
> specific callback

I'm not sure what that looks like, but I agree with the idea.  Could
the pages that type1 knows about every be anything other than a
superset of the dirty pages?  Perhaps a device ioctl to flush unused
mappings would be sufficient.

> 2) If there could be multiple mediated devices from different vendors
> in same container while not all mediated devices support live migration,
> would container-level interface impose some limitation?

Dirty page logging is only one small part of migration, each
migrate-able device would still need to provide a device-level
interface to save/restore state.  The migration would fail when we get
to the device(s) that don't provide that.  Thanks,

Alex