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Yunhong,

Thank you for bringing that up on the live migration support. In addition
to the two solutions you mentioned, Irena has a different solution. Let me
put all the them here again:
    1. network xml/group based solution.
       In this solution, each host that supports a provider net/physical
net can define a SRIOV group (it's hard to avoid the term as you can see
from the suggestion you made based on the PCI flavor proposal). For each
SRIOV group supported on a compute node, A network XML will be created the
first time the nova compute service is running on that node.
        * nova will conduct scheduling, but not PCI device allocation
        * it's a simple and clean solution, documented in libvirt as the
way to support live migration with SRIOV. In addition, a network xml is
nicely mapped into a provider net.
    2. network xml per PCI device based solution
       This is the solution you brought up in this email, and Ian
mentioned this to me as well. In this solution, a network xml is created
when A VM is created. the network xml needs to be removed once the VM is
removed. This hasn't been tried out as far as I  know.
    3. interface xml/interface rename based solution
       Irena brought this up. In this solution, the ethernet interface
name corresponding to the PCI device attached to the VM needs to be
renamed. One way to do so without requiring system reboot is to change the
udev rule's file for interface renaming, followed by a udev reload.

Now, with the first solution, Nova doesn't seem to have control over or
visibility of the PCI device allocated for the VM before the VM is
launched. This needs to be confirmed with the libvirt support and see if
such capability can be provided. This may be a potential drawback if a
neutron plugin requires detailed PCI device information for operation.
Irena may provide more insight into this. Ideally, neutron shouldn't need
this information because the device configuration can be done by libvirt
invoking the PCI device driver.

The other two solutions are similar. For example, you can view the second
solution as one way to rename an interface, or camouflage an interface
under a network name. They all require additional works before the VM is
created and after the VM is removed.

I also agree with you that we should take a look at XenAPI on this.


With regard to your suggestion on how to implement the first solution with
some predefined group attribute, I think it definitely can be done. As I
have pointed it out earlier, the PCI flavor proposal is actually a
generalized version of the PCI group. In other words, in the PCI group
proposal, we have one predefined attribute called PCI group, and
everything else works on top of that. In the PCI flavor proposal,
attribute is arbitrary. So certainly we can define a particular attribute
for networking, which let's temporarily call sriov_group. But I can see
with this idea of predefined attributes, more of them will be required by
different types of devices in the future. I'm sure it will keep us busy
although I'm not sure it's in a good way.

I was expecting you or someone else can provide a practical deployment
scenario that would justify the flexibilities and the complexities.
Although I'd prefer to keep it simple and generalize it later once a
particular requirement is clearly identified, I'm fine to go with it if
that's most of the folks want to do.

--Robert



On 1/16/14 8:36 PM, "yunhong jiang" <yunhong.jiang at linux.intel.com> wrote:

>On Thu, 2014-01-16 at 01:28 +0100, Ian Wells wrote:
>> To clarify a couple of Robert's points, since we had a conversation
>> earlier:
>> On 15 January 2014 23:47, Robert Li (baoli) <baoli at cisco.com> wrote:
>>           ---  do we agree that BDF address (or device id, whatever
>>         you call it), and node id shouldn't be used as attributes in
>>         defining a PCI flavor?
>> 
>> 
>> Note that the current spec doesn't actually exclude it as an option.
>> It's just an unwise thing to do.  In theory, you could elect to define
>> your flavors using the BDF attribute but determining 'the card in this
>> slot is equivalent to all the other cards in the same slot in other
>> machines' is probably not the best idea...  We could lock it out as an
>> option or we could just assume that administrators wouldn't be daft
>> enough to try.
>> 
>> 
>>                 * the compute node needs to know the PCI flavor.
>>         [...] 
>>                           - to support live migration, we need to use
>>         it to create network xml
>> 
>> 
>> I didn't understand this at first and it took me a while to get what
>> Robert meant here.
>> 
>> This is based on Robert's current code for macvtap based live
>> migration.  The issue is that if you wish to migrate a VM and it's
>> tied to a physical interface, you can't guarantee that the same
>> physical interface is going to be used on the target machine, but at
>> the same time you can't change the libvirt.xml as it comes over with
>> the migrating machine.  The answer is to define a network and refer
>> out to it from libvirt.xml.  In Robert's current code he's using the
>> group name of the PCI devices to create a network containing the list
>> of equivalent devices (those in the group) that can be macvtapped.
>> Thus when the host migrates it will find another, equivalent,
>> interface.  This falls over in the use case under consideration where
>> a device can be mapped using more than one flavor, so we have to
>> discard the use case or rethink the implementation.
>> 
>> There's a more complex solution - I think - where we create a
>> temporary network for each macvtap interface a machine's going to use,
>> with a name based on the instance UUID and port number, and containing
>> the device to map.  Before starting the migration we would create a
>> replacement network containing only the new device on the target host;
>> migration would find the network from the name in the libvirt.xml, and
>> the content of that network would behave identically.  We'd be
>> creating libvirt networks on the fly and a lot more of them, and we'd
>> need decent cleanup code too ('when freeing a PCI device, delete any
>> network it's a member of'), so it all becomes a lot more hairy.
>> _______________________________________________
>> OpenStack-dev mailing list
>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>
>Ian/Robert, below is my understanding to the method Robet want to use,
>am I right?
>
>a) Define a libvirt network as  "Using a macvtap "direct" connection"
>section at "http://libvirt.org/formatnetwork.html . For example, like
>followed one: 
><network>
>        <name> group_name1 </name>
>        <forward mode="bridge">
>          <interface dev="eth20"/>
>          <interface dev="eth21"/>
>          <interface dev="eth22"/>
>          <interface dev="eth23"/>
>          <interface dev="eth24"/>
>        </forward>
>      </network>
>
>
>b) When assign SRIOV NIC devices to an instance, as in "Assignment from
>a pool of SRIOV VFs in a libvirt <network> definition" section in
>http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#PCI_Passthrough_of_host_network_de
>vices , use libvirt network definition group_name1. For example, like
>followed one:
>
>  <interface type='network'>
>    <source network='group_name1'>
>  </interface>
>
>
>If my understanding is correct, then I have something unclear yet:
>a) How will the libvirt create the libvirt network (i.e. libvirt network
>group_name1)? Will it has be created when compute boot up, or it will be
>created before instance creation? I suppose per Robert's design, it's
>created when compute node is up, am I right?
>
>b) If all the interface are used up by instance, what will happen.
>Considering that 4 interface allocated to the group_name1 libvirt
>network, and user try to migrate 6 instance with 'group_name1' network,
>what will happen?
>
>And below is my comments:
>
>a) Yes, this is in fact different with the current nova PCI support
>philosophy. Currently we assume Nova owns the devices, manage the device
>assignment to each instance. While in such situation, libvirt network is
>in fact another layer of PCI device management layer (although very
>thin) !
>
>b) This also remind me that possibly other VMM like XenAPI has special
>requirement and we need input/confirmation from them also.
>
>
>As how to resolve the issue, I think there are several solution:
>
>a) Create one libvirt network for each SRIOV NIC assigned to each
>instance dynamic, i.e. the libvirt network always has only one interface
>included, it may be static created or dynamical created. This solution
>in fact removes the allocation functionality of the libvirt network and
>leaves only the configuration functionality.
>
>b) Change Nova PCI to support a special type of PCI device attribute
>(like the PCI group). For these PCI attributes , the PCI device
>scheduler will match a PCI devices only if the attributes is specified
>clearly in the PCI flavor.
>  Below is an example:
>  considering two PCI SRIOV device:
>	Dev1: BDF=00:0.1, vendor_id=1, device_id=1, group=grp1
>	Dev2: BDF=00:1.1, vendor_id=1, device_id=2
>    i.e. Dev2 has no group attributes are specified.
>
>   And we mark 'group' attribute as special attributes.
>
>   Considering follow flavors:
>        Flavor1: name=flv1, vendor_id=1
>	Flavor2: name=flv2, vendor_id=1, group=grp1
>	Flavor3: name=flv3, group=grp1.
>
>   The Dev1 will never be assigned to flv2.
>   This solution try to separate the devices managed by Nova exclusively
>and devices managed by Nova/libvirt together.
>
>Any idea?
>
>Thanks
>--jyh
>
>
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