Re: [RFC PATCH 0/9] migration/snap-tool: External snapshot utility

[Peter Xu]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 07:32:13PM +0300, Andrey Gruzdev wrote:
> This series is a kind of PoC for asynchronous snapshot reverting. This is
> about external snapshots only and doesn't involve block devices. Thus, it's
> mainly intended to be used with the new 'background-snapshot' migration
> capability and otherwise standard QEMU migration mechanism.
> 
> The major ideas behind this first version were:
>   * Make it compatible with 'exec:'-style migration - options can be create
>     some separate tool or integrate into qemu-system.
>   * Support asynchronous revert stage by using unaltered postcopy logic
>     at destination. To do this, we should be capable of saving RAM pages
>     so that any particular page can be directly addressed by it's block ID
>     and page offset. Possible solutions here seem to be:
>       use separate index (and storing it somewhere)
>       create sparse file on host FS and address pages with file offset
>       use QCOW2 (or other) image container with inherent sparsity support
>   * Make snapshot image file dense on the host FS so we don't depend on
>     copy/backup tools and how they deal with sparse files. Off course,
>     there's some performance cost for this choice.
>   * Make the code which is parsing unstructered format of migration stream,
>     at least, not very sophisticated. Also, try to have minimum dependencies
>     on QEMU migration code, both RAM and device.
>   * Try to keep page save latencies small while not degrading migration
>     bandwidth too much.
> 
> For this first version I decided not to integrate into main QEMU code but
> create a separate tool. The main reason is that there's not too much migration
> code that is target-specific and can be used in it's unmodified form. Also,
> it's still not very clear how to make 'qemu-system' integration in terms of
> command-line (or monitor/QMP?) interface extension.
> 
> For the storage format, QCOW2 as a container and large (1MB) cluster size seem
> to be an optimal choice. Larger cluster is beneficial for performance 
> particularly
> in the case when image preallocation is disabled. Such cluster size does not 
> result
> in too high internal fragmentation level (~10% of space waste in most cases) 
> yet
> allows to reduce significantly the number of expensive cluster allocations.
> 
> A bit tricky part is dispatching QEMU migration stream cause it is mostly
> unstructered and depends on configuration parameters like 'send-configuration'
> and 'send-section-footer'. But, for the case with default values in migration
> globals it seems that implemented dispatching code works well and won't have
> compatibility issues in a reasonably long time frame.
> 
> I decided to keep RAM save path synchronous, anyhow it's better to use 
> writeback
> cache mode for the live snapshots cause of it's interleaving page address 
> pattern.
> Page coalescing buffer is used to merge contiguous pages to optimize block 
> layer
> writes.
> 
> Since for snapshot loading opening image file in cached mode would not do any 
> good,
> it implies that Linux native AIO and O_DIRECT mode is used in a common 
> scenario.
> AIO support in RAM loading path is implemented by using a ring of preallocated
> fixed-sized buffers in such a way that there's always a number of outstanding 
> block
> requests anytime. It also ensures in-order request completion.
> 
> How to use:
> 
> **Save:**
> * qemu> migrate_set_capability background-snapshot on
> * qemu> migrate "exec:<qemu-bin-path>/qemu-snap -s <virtual-size>
>            --cache=writeback --aio=threads save <image-file.qcow2>"
> 
> **Load:**
> * Use 'qemu-system-* -incoming defer'
> * qemu> migrate_incoming "exec:<qemu-bin-path>/qemu-snap
>           --cache=none --aio=native load <image-file.qcow2>"
> 
> **Load with postcopy:**
> * Use 'qemu-system-* -incoming defer'
> * qemu> migrate_set_capability postcopy-ram on
> * qemu> migrate_incoming "exec:<qemu-bin-path>/qemu-snap --postcopy=60
>           --cache=none --aio=native load <image-file.qcow2>"
> 
> And yes, asynchronous revert works well only with SSD, not with rotational 
> disk..
> 
> Some performance stats:
> * SATA SSD drive with ~500/450 MB/s sequantial read/write and ~60K IOPS max.
> * 220 MB/s average save rate (depends on workload)
> * 440 MB/s average load rate in precopy
> * 260 MB/s average load rate in postcopy

Andrey,

Before I try to read it (since I'm probably not the best person to review
it..).. Would you remind me on the major difference of external snapshots
comparing to the existing one, and problems to solve?

Thanks,

-- 
Peter Xu