Re: [PATCH 0/5] Live Migration Acceleration with IAA Compression

[Peter Xu]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 03:52:14PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 01:40:23PM +0200, Juan Quintela wrote:
> > Yuan Liu <yuan1.liu@intel.com> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I am writing to submit a code change aimed at enhancing live migration
> > > acceleration by leveraging the compression capability of the Intel
> > > In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA).
> > >
> > > Enabling compression functionality during the live migration process can
> > > enhance performance, thereby reducing downtime and network bandwidth
> > > requirements. However, this improvement comes at the cost of additional
> > > CPU resources, posing a challenge for cloud service providers in terms of
> > > resource allocation. To address this challenge, I have focused on 
> > > offloading
> > > the compression overhead to the IAA hardware, resulting in performance 
> > > gains.
> > >
> > > The implementation of the IAA (de)compression code is based on Intel Query
> > > Processing Library (QPL), an open-source software project designed for
> > > IAA high-level software programming.
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > > Yuan Liu
> > 
> > After reviewing the patches:
> > 
> > - why are you doing this on top of old compression code, that is
> >   obsolete, deprecated and buggy
> > 
> > - why are you not doing it on top of multifd.
> > 
> > You just need to add another compression method on top of multifd.
> > See how it was done for zstd:
> 
> I'm not sure that is ideal approach.  IIUC, the IAA/QPL library
> is not defining a new compression format. Rather it is providing
> a hardware accelerator for 'deflate' format, as can be made
> compatible with zlib:
> 
>   
> https://intel.github.io/qpl/documentation/dev_guide_docs/c_use_cases/deflate/c_deflate_zlib_gzip.html#zlib-and-gzip-compatibility-reference-link
> 
> With multifd we already have a 'zlib' compression format, and so
> this IAA/QPL logic would effectively just be a providing a second
> implementation of zlib.
> 
> Given the use of a standard format, I would expect to be able
> to use software zlib on the src, mixed with IAA/QPL zlib on
> the target, or vica-verca.
> 
> IOW, rather than defining a new compression format for this,
> I think we could look at a new migration parameter for
> 
> "compression-accelerator": ["auto", "none", "qpl"]
> 
> with 'auto' the default, such that we can automatically enable
> IAA/QPL when 'zlib' format is requested, if running on a suitable
> host.

I was also curious about the format of compression comparing to software
ones when reading.

Would there be a use case that one would prefer soft compression even if
hardware accelerator existed, no matter on src/dst?

I'm wondering whether we can avoid that one more parameter but always use
hardware accelerations as long as possible.

Thanks,

-- 
Peter Xu