Re: [Qemu-devel] Live migration from Qemu 2.12 hosts to Qemu 3.2 hosts, with VMX flag enabled in the guest?

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Mark Mielke (address@hidden) wrote:
> Thank you for the work on nested virtualization. Having had live migrations
> fail in the past when nested virtualization has been active, it is great to
> see that clever people have been working on this problem!
> 
> My question is about whether a migration path has been considered to allow
> live migration from Qemu 2.12 hosts to Qemu 3.2 hosts, with VMX flag
> enabled in the guest?
> 
> Qemu 2.12 doesn't know about the new nested state available from newer
> Linux kernels, and it might be used on a machine with an older kernel that
> doesn't make the nested state available. If Qemu 3.2 is on an up-to-date
> host with an up-to-date kernel that does support the nested state, I'd like
> to ensure we have the ability to try the migrations.
> 
> In the past, I've found that:
> 
> 1) If the guest had used nested virtualization before, the migration often
> fails. However, if we reboot the guest and do not use nested
> virtualization, this simplifies to...
> 2) If the guest has never used nested virtualization before, the migration
> succeeds.
> 
> I would like to leverage 2) as much as possible to migrate forwards to Qemu
> 3.2 hosts (once it is available). I can normally enter the guest to see if
> 1) is likely or not, and handle these ones specially. If only 20% of the
> guests have ever used nested virtualization, then I would like the option
> to safely migrate 80% of the guests using live migration, and handle the
> 20% as exceptions.
> 
> This is the 3.1 change log that got my attention:
> 
> 
>    - x86 machines cannot be live-migrated if nested Intel virtualization is
>    enabled. The next version of QEMU will be able to do live migration when
>    nested virtualization is enabled, if supported by the kernel.
> 
> 
> I believe this is the change it refers to:
> 
> commit d98f26073bebddcd3da0ba1b86c3a34e840c0fb8
> Author: Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden>
> Date:   Wed Nov 14 10:38:13 2018 +0100
> 
>     target/i386: kvm: add VMX migration blocker
> 
>     Nested VMX does not support live migration yet.  Add a blocker
>     until that is worked out.
> 
>     Nested SVM only does not support it, but unfortunately it is
>     enabled by default for -cpu host so we cannot really disable it.
> 
>     Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden>
> 
> 
> This particular check seems very simplistic:
> 
> +    if ((env->features[FEAT_1_ECX] & CPUID_EXT_VMX) && !vmx_mig_blocker) {
> +        error_setg(&vmx_mig_blocker,
> +                   "Nested VMX virtualization does not support live
> migration yet");
> +        r = migrate_add_blocker(vmx_mig_blocker, &local_err);
> +        if (local_err) {
> +            error_report_err(local_err);
> +            error_free(vmx_mig_blocker);
> +            return r;
> +        }
> +    }
> +
> 
> It fails if the flag is set, rather than if any nested virtualization has
> been used before.
> 
> I'm concerned I will end up with a requirement for *all* guests to be
> restarted in order to migrate them to the new hosts, rather than just the
> ones that would have a problem.

I think you should be able to migrate from 2.12->3.1 like this, but
you'd hit the problem when you then try and migrate again between your
new QEMUs.

I guess we could modify it to wire it to machine type, so that
older machine types didn't block.

Dave

> Thoughts?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -- 
> Mark Mielke <address@hidden>
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK