[nova] The pros/cons for libvirt persistent assignment and DB persistent assignment.

Alex Xu soulxu at gmail.com
Fri Aug 23 08:43:43 UTC 2019


Matt Riedemann <mriedemos at gmail.com> 于2019年8月23日周五 上午5:53写道:

> On 8/21/2019 1:59 AM, Alex Xu wrote:
> > We get a lot of discussion on how to do the claim for the vpmem. There
> > are a few points we are trying to match:
> >
> > * Avoid race problem. (the current VGPU assignment has been found having
> > race issue https://launchpad.net/bugs/1836204)
> > * Avoid the device assignment management to be virt driver and
> > platform-specific.
> > * Keep it simple.
> >
> > Currently, we go through two solutions here. This email is going to
> > summary the pros/cons of these two solutions.
> >
> > #1 Without Nova DB persistent for the assignment info, depends on
> > hypervisor persistent it.
> >
> >     The idea is adding
> > VirtDriver.claim/unclaim_for_instance(instance_uuid, flavor_id)
> > interface. The assignment info is populated from hypervisor when
> > nova-compute startup. And keep in the memory of VirtDriver. The
>
> Is there any reason the device assignment in-memory mapping has to be in
> the virt driver and not, for example, the ResourceTracker itself? This
> becomes important below.
>

We will answer this below. It is about whether using migration allocation
make sense or not.


>
> > instance_uuid is used to distinguish the claim from the different
> > instance. The flavor_id is used for the same host resize, to distinguish
> > the claim for source and target. This virt driver method is being
> > invoked inside ResourceTracker to avoid the race problem. There is no
> > any nova DB persistent for the assignment info.
> >
> https://review.opendev.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/nova+branch:master+topic:bp/virtual-persistent-memory
> >
> > pros:
> > * Hidden all the device detail and virt driver detail inside the virt
> > driver.
> > * Less upgrade issue in the future since it doesn't involve any nova DB
> > model change
> > * Expecting as simple implementation since everything inside virt driver.
> > cons:
> >     * Two cases are being found, the domain XML being lost for Libvirt
> > virt driver. And we don't know other hypervisor behavior yet.
>
> How do we "lose" the domain xml? I guess your next points are examples?
>
> >        * For the same host resize, the source and target instance are
> > sharing single one domain XML. After the libvirt virt driver updated the
> > domain XML to the target instance, the source instance's assignment
> > information will be lost when a nova-compute restart happened. That
> > means the resized instance can't be revert, the only choice for the user
> > is to confirm the resize.
>
> As discussed with Dan and me in IRC a week or two ago, we suggested you
> could do the same migration-based allocation switch for move operations
> as we do for cold migrate, resize and live migration since Queens, where
> the source node allocations are consumed by the migration record and the
> target node allocations are consumed by the instance. The conductor
> swaps the source node allocations before calling the scheduler which
> will create the target node allocations with the instance. On
> confirm/revert we either drop the source node allocations (held by the
> migration) or swap them back (and drop the target node allocations held
> by the instance).
>
> In your device case, clearly conductor and placement isn't involved
> since we're not tracking those low-level details in placement. Placement
> just knows there is a certain amount of some resource class but not
> which consumers are actually assigned which devices on the hypervisor
> (like pci device management). But as far as keeping track of the
> assignments in memory, we could still do the same swap where the
> migration record is tracking the old flavor device assignments (in the
> virt driver or resource tracker) and the instance record is tracking the
> new flavor device assignments. That resolves the same-host resize case,
> correct? Doing it generically in the ResourceTracker is why I asked
> about doing that above in the RT rather than the driver.
>
> What that doesn't solve is restarts of the compute service while there
> is a pending resize, which is why we need to persist some information
> somewhere. We could use the domain xml if it contained the flavor id,
> but it doesn't - and for same-host resize we only have one domain xml so
> that's not really an option (as you've noted).
>

Actually, there are two problems here, let us talk about it separately:

1. lost allocation info after compute service restart for the same host
resize

This is the about above point. It is nothing about using migration
allocation or using instance_uuid + flavor_id. It only can be fixed by DB
persistent, also as you said later about persistent in MigrationContext. I
will explain that later.

2. Supporting same host cold migration

This is the point I said below.
For the same host resize, instance_uuid + flavor_id is working very well.
But it can't support the same host cold migration. And yes, migration
allocation can fix it. But also as you said, do we need to support the same
host cold migration?

If the answer is no, then we needn't bother it. instance_uuid + flavor_id
is much simple. If the answer is yes, right, we can put it into the RT. But
it will be complex, maybe we need a data model like the DB way proposal to
pass the virt driver/platform specific info between RT and virt driver.
Also, think about the case, we need to check if there is any incomplete
live-migration, we need to do a cleanup for all free vpmems, since we lost
the allocation info for live-migration. Then we need a virt dirver
interface to trigger that cleanup, pretty sure I don't want to call it as
driver.cleanup_vpmems(). We also need to change the existing driver.spawn
method, to pass the assigned resource into virt driver. Also thinking about
the case of interrupted migration, I guess there is no way to switch the

I also remember Dan said, it isn't good to not support same host cold
migration.


> >        * For live migration, the target host's domain XML will be
> > cleanup by libvirt after a host restart. The assignment information is
> > lost before nova-compute startup and doing a cleanup.
>
> I'm not really following you here. This is not an expected situation,
> correct? Meaning the target compute service is restarted while there is
> an in-progress live migration? I imagine if that happens we have lots of
> problems and most (manual) recovery procedures are going to involve the
> operator trying to destroy the guest and it's related resources from the
> target host and hard rebooting to recover the guest on the source host.
>

It is more terrible, the restart of nova-compute will just set the instance
back to active status
https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/62f6a0a1bc6c4b24621e1c2e927177f99501bef3/nova/compute/manager.py#L1058

And leaving the target host without any cleanup. Also in the LM rollback
method, we set the instance back to action in the very beginning, if the
compute restart before actual cleanup, then the target won't be clean up
also.
https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/62f6a0a1bc6c4b24621e1c2e927177f99501bef3/nova/compute/manager.py#L7323

We shouldn't set the instance back to active when there is migration isn't
clean up.

Those are existing bugs, and we should fix it.
Whatever the solution we choose, it won't be the thing can be fixed
automatically with new solution.


>
> >     * Can not support the same host cold migration. Since we need a way
> > to identify the source and target instance's assignment in memory. But
> > the same host cold migration means the same instance UUID and same
> > flavor ID, there isn't another else can be used to distinguish the
> > assignment.
>
> The only in-tree virt driver that supports cold migrating on the same
> compute service host is the vmware driver, and that does not support
> things like VGPUs or VPMEMs, so I'm not sure why cold migration on the
> same host is a concern here - it's not supported and no one is working
> on adding that support.
>
> >     * There are workarounds added for above points, the code becomes
> > fragile.
>
> To summarize, it sounds like the biggest problem is the lack of
> persistence during a same-host resize because we'd lost the in-memory
> device assignment tracking, even if we did the migration-based
> allocation swap magic as described above.
>

Exactly


>
> Could we have a compromise where for all times *except* during some
> migration, we get the assigned devices from the hypervisor, but
> otherwise during a migration we store the old/new assignments in the
> MigrationContext? That would give us the persistence we need and would
> only be something that we temporarily care about during a migration. The
> thing I'm not sure about is if we do that, does it make things more
> complicated in general for the non-migration cases, or if we do it
> should we just go the extra mile and always be tracking assigned devices
> in the database exactly like what we do for PCI devices today - meaning
> we wouldn't have a special edge case just for migrations with these
> types of resources.
>

Then the only difference with DB persistent way is that store the
allocation on the "Instance.resources" also.
If we do that one more step, then we needn't change our virt driver
interface, and thinking about how to switch the consumer from migration
back to instance. Which are the complex I said above.


>
> >
> > #2 With nova DB persistent, but using virt driver specific blob to store
> > virt driver specific info.
> >
> >     The idea is persistent the assignment for instance into DB. The
> > resource tracker gets available resources from virt driver. The resource
> > tracker will calculate on the fly based on available resources and
> > assigned resources from instance DB. The new field ·instance.resources·
> > is designed for supporting virt driver specific metadata, then hidden
> > the virt driver and platform detail from RT.
> > https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/vpmems-non-virt-driver-specific-new
>
> I left some comments in the etherpad about the proposed claims process
> but the "on the fly" part concerns me for performance, especially if we
> don't make that conditional based on the types of resources we're
> claiming. During a claim the ResourceTracker already has the list of
> tracked_instances and tracked_migrations it cares about, but it sounds
> like you're proposing that we would also now have to re-fetch all of
> that data from the database just to get the resources and migration
> context information for any instances tracked by that host to determine
> what their assignments are. That seems really heavy-weight to me and is
> my major concern with this approach, well, that and the fact it sounds
> like we're creating a new version of the PCIManager (though more
> generic, it could have a lot of the same split brain type issues we've
> had with tracking PCI device inventory and allocations over the years
> since it was introduced; by split brain I mean the hypervisor saying one
> thing but nova thinking another).
>

I think you are right, we can use RT.tracked_instances and
RT.tracked_migrations. Then it isn't on the fly anymore.
There are two existing bugs should be fixed.

1. The orphaned instance isn't in RT.tracked_instance. Although there is
resource consuming for orphaned instance
https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/62f6a0a1bc6c4b24621e1c2e927177f99501bef3/nova/compute/resource_tracker.py#L771,
the virt driver interface
https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/62f6a0a1bc6c4b24621e1c2e927177f99501bef3/nova/compute/resource_tracker.py#L1447
doesn't
implement by most of virt driver.
2. The error status migration isn't in RT.tracked_migration. The resize may
interrupt in the middle. Then we set the migration to an error status.
Although we have a _clean_incomplete_migration periodic task to cleanup
those error migration, there is a window between cleanup, the RT doesn't
count the resource consuming.

Those are existing bugs, and easy to be fixed. That is why I use the
on-the-fly in the beginning, but I agree, those bugs are easy to fix, and
the code will begin more tidy.

For the split-brain problem, to be honest, the domain XML way shows to us,
it can't fix it also. It lost the allocation for the same host resize and
live migration.


>
> >
> > pros:
> >     * Persistent assignment into instance object. Avoid the corner case
> > we lost the assignment.
> >     * The ResourceTracker is responsible for doing the claim job. This
> > is more reliable and no race problem, since ResourceTracker works very
> > well for a long time.
>
> Heh, I guess yeah. :) There are a lot of dragons in that code and we're
> still fixing bugs in it even though it should be mostly stable after all
> of these years. But resource tracking in general sucks regardless of
> where it happens (RT, placement or the virt driver) so we just have to
> be comfortable with knowing there are going to be dragons.
>

I already list the bug above, I think the problem is we missing some
tracking and doesn't have a close loop for the instance and migration
status.
I add my analyze in the bottom of the etherpad.
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/vpmems-non-virt-driver-specific-new


> >     * The virt driver specific json-blob hidden the virt driver/platform
> > detail from the ResourceTracker.
>
> Random json blobs are nasty in general especially if we need to convert
> data at runtime later for some upgrade purpose. What is proposed in the
> etherpad seems OK(ish) though given the only very random thing is the
> 'metadata' field, but I could see that all getting confusing to maintain
> later when we have different schema/semantic rules about what's in the
> metadata depending on the resource class and virt driver. But we'll
> likely have that problem anyway if we go with the non-persistent option
> #1 above.
>

It is a JOSN blob which dump from versioned object, so it should be OK?


>
> >     * The free resource is calculated on the fly, keeping the
> > implementation simple. Actually, the RT just provides a point to do the
> > claim, needn't involve the complex of RT.update_available_resources
> > cons:
> >     * Doesn't like PCIManager which has both instance side and host side
> > persistent info. On the fly calculation should take care of the orphaned
> > instance(the instance is deleted from DB, but still existing on the
> > host), so actually, it isn't unresolvable issue. And it isn't too hard
> > to upgrade to have host side persistent info in the future if we want.
> >     * Data model change for the original proposal. Need review to decide
> > the data model enough generic
> >
> > Currently, Sean, Eric and I prefer the #2 now since the #1 has flaws for
> > the same host resize and live migration can't be skipped by design.
>
> At this point I can't say I have a strong opinion. I think either
> approach is going to be complicated and buggy and hard to maintain,
> especially if we don't have CI for these more exotic scenarios (which we
> don't for VGPU or VPMEM even though you said someone is working on the
> latter). I've voiced my concerns here but I'm not going to "die on a
> hill" for this, so in the end I'll likely roll over for whatever those
> of you that really care about this want to do, and know that you're
> going to be maintainers of it.
>

If you worry about the VPMEM itself, then Rui is working on CI, he said he
needs two weeks before he has done the work. We can ask him give an update
at here if you want.

If you worry about the RT part, I think we can have functional test to
cover that?

I won't say the DB way is complicated, the most of code in RT is about to
get the assigned resource from tracked_instance and tracked_migration, then
compare to the available resource. The buggy is existing nova bug. It isn't
the fault of the proposal. I don't know what the maintain problem point to.
it will be great we have a specific case to discuss.


> --
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt
>
>
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