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Subject: Re: [virtio-comment] Seeking guidance for custom virtIO device
On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 01:09:16PM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:On 17.04.20 12:33, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 02:23:48PM +0300, Eftime, Petre wrote:On 2020-04-14 13:50, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 12:09:22PM +0200, Stefano Garzarella wrote:Hi, On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 09:36:58AM +0000, Eftime, Petre wrote:Hi all, I am looking for guidance on how to proceed with regards to either reserving a virtio device ID for a specific device for a particular usecase or for formalizing a device type that could be potentially used by others. We have developed a virtio device that acts as a transport for API calls between a guest userspace library and a backend server in the host system. Our requirements are: * multiple clients in the guest (multiple servers is not required) * provide an in-order, reliable datagram transport mechanism * datagram size should be either negotiable or large (16k-64k?) * performance is not a big concern for our usecaseIt looks really close to vsock.The reason why we used a special device and not something else is the following: * vsock spec does not contain a datagram specification (eg. SOCK_DGRAM, SOCK_SEQPACKET) and the effort of updating the Linux driver and other implementations for this particular purpose seemed relatively high. The path to approach this problem wasn't clear. Vsock today only works in SOCK_STREAM mode and this is not ideal: the receiver must implement additional state and buffer incoming data, adding complexity and host resource usage.AF_VSOCK itself supports SOCK_DGRAM, but virtio-vsock doesn't provide this feature. (vmci provides SOCK_DGRAM support) The changes should not be too intrusive in the virtio-vsock specs and implementation, we already have the "type" field in the packet header to address this new feature. We also have the credit-mechanism to provide in-order and reliable packets delivery. Maybe the hardest part could be change something in the core to handle multiple transports that provide SOCK_DGRAM, for nested VMs. We already did for stream sockets, but we didn't handle the datagram socket for now. I am not sure how convenient it is to have two very similar devices... If you decide to give virtio-vsock a chance to get SOCK_DGRAM, I can try to give you a more complete list of changes to make. :-)I although think this sounds exactly like adding SOCK_DGRAM support to virtio-vsock. The reason why the SOCK_DGRAM code was dropped from early virtio-vsock patches is that the prototocol design didn't ensure reliable delivery semantics. At that time there were no real users for SOCK_DGRAM so it was left as a feature to be added later. The challenge with reusing the SOCK_STREAM credit mechanism for SOCK_DGRAM is that datagrams are connectionless. The credit mechanism consists per-connection state. Maybe it can be extended to cover SOCK_DGRAM too. I would urge you to add SOCK_DGRAM to virtio-vsock instead of trying to create another device that does basically what is within the scope of virtio-vsock. It took quite a bit of time and effort to get AF_VSOCK support into various software components, and doing that again for another device is more effort than one would think. If you don't want to modify the Linux guest driver, then let's just discuss the device spec and protocol. Someone else could make the Linux driver changes. StefanI think it would be great if we could get the virtio-vsock driver to support SOCK_DGRAM/SOCK_SEQPACKET as it would make a lot of sense. But one of the reasons that I don't really like virtio-vsock at the moment for my use-case in particular is that it doesn't seem well fitted to support non-cooperating live-migrateable VMs all that well. One problem is that to avoid guest-visible disconnections to any service while doing a live migration there might be performance impact if using vsock for any other reasons. I'll try to exemplify what I mean with this setup: * workload 1 sends data constantly via an AF_VSOCK SOCK_STREAM * workload 2 sends commands / gets replies once in a while via an AF_VSOCK SOCK_SEQPACKET.af_vsock.ko doesn't support SOCK_SEQPACKET. Is this what you are considering adding? Earlier in this thread I thought we were discussing SOCK_DGRAM, which has different semantics than SOCK_SEQPACKET. The good news is that SOCK_SEQPACKET should be easier to add to net/vmw_vsock than SOCK_DGRAM because the flow control credit mechanism used for SOCK_STREAM should just work for SOCK_SEQPACKET.Assume the VM needs to be migrated: 1) If workload 2 currently not processing anything, even if there are some commands for it queued up, everything is fine, VMM can pause the guest and serialize. 2) If there's an outstanding command the VMM needs to wait for it to finish and wait for the receive queue of the request to have enough capacity for the reply, but since this capacity is guest driven, this second part can take a while / forever. This is definitely not ideal.I think you're describing how to reserve space for control packets so that the device never has to wait on the driver. Have you seen the drivers/vhost/vsock.c device implementation? It has a strategy for suspending tx queue processing until the rx queue has more space. Multiple implementation-specific approaches are possible, so this isn't in the specification.I short, I think workload 2 needs to be in control of its own queues for this to work reasonably well, I don't know if sharing ownership of queues can work. The device we defined doesn't have this problem: first of all, it's on a separate queue, so workload 1 never competes in any way with workload 2, and workload 2 always has where to place replies, since it has an attached reply buffer by design.Flow control in vsock works like this: 1. Data packets are accounted against per-socket buffers and removed from the virtqueue immediately. This allows multiple competing data streams to share a single virtqueue without starvation. It's the per-socket buffer that can be exhausted, but that only affects the application that isn't reading the socket socket. The other side will stop sending more data when credit is exhausted so that delivery can be guaranteed. 2. Control packet replies can be sent in response to pretty much any packet. Therefore, it's necessary to suspend packet processing when the other side's virtqueue is full. This way you don't need to wait for them midway through processing a packet. There is a problem with #2 which hasn't been solved. If both sides are operating at N-1 queue capacity (they are almost exhausted), then can we reach a deadlock where both sides suspend queue processing because they are waiting for the other side? This has not been fully investigated or demonstrated, but it's an area that needs attention sometime.Perhaps a good compromise would be to have a multi-queue virtio-vsock orThat would mean we've reached the conclusion that it's impossible to have bi-directional communication with guaranteed delivery over a shared communications channel. virtio-serial did this to avoid having to come up with a scheme to avoid starvation.Let me throw in one more problem: Imagine that we want to have virtio-vsock communication terminated in different domains, each of which has ownership of their own device emulation. The easiest case where this happens is to have vsock between hypervisor and guest as well as between a PCIe implementation via VFIO and a guest. But the same can be true for stub domain like setups, where each connection end lives in its own stub domain (vhost-user in the vsock case I suppose). In that case, it's impossible to share the one queue we have, no?By the way, "dedicated virtqueues" could be interesting as a separate feature. I just think that SOCK_SEQPACKET should be implemented with flow control like SOCK_STREAM. Then, as a separate feature, the device could advertise dedicated virtqueues allowing SOCK_STREAM and SOCK_SEQPACKET communication directly in the virtqueue. The dedicated virtqueue approach should be faster since it eliminates the need for a memcpy to socket receive buffers. Stefan
Yes, SOCK_SEQPACKET seems relatively easy to implement.
Would devices need to add a feature flag to advertise the fact that they support SOCK_SEQPACKET? Not sure I understand all the backwards compatibility issues adding this might introduce, but I think it would be required since the idea is that if you write a message on a SOCK_SEQPACKET socket it can't be split into multiple messages to the receiver, and both the driver and the device would need to know that.
A marker in the header should denote that there is more data
to come in the same packet, in the next descriptor, so that
message boundaries can be preserved, even if the driver doesn't
place large enough descriptors in the RX queue. The device would
split and mark messages accordingly and then the driver would
re-assemble them before sending them to af_vsock.
Otherwise, minimal descriptor sizes should be part of the
specification such that you can rely on some specific message
size rather than what the driver decides to place in the queue,
which so far is implementation defined. The first option seems
more flexible to me.
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