On 9/5/2025 12:48 PM, Peter Xu wrote:
Add Vladimir and Dan.
On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 10:17:14AM -0700, Steve Sistare wrote:
This patch series adds the live migration cpr-exec mode.
The new user-visible interfaces are:
* cpr-exec (MigMode migration parameter)
* cpr-exec-command (migration parameter)
cpr-exec mode is similar in most respects to cpr-transfer mode, with the
primary difference being that old QEMU directly exec's new QEMU. The user
specifies the command to exec new QEMU in the migration parameter
cpr-exec-command.
Why?
In a containerized QEMU environment, cpr-exec reuses an existing QEMU
container and its assigned resources. By contrast, cpr-transfer mode
requires a new container to be created on the same host as the target of
the CPR operation. Resources must be reserved for the new container, while
the old container still reserves resources until the operation completes.
Avoiding over commitment requires extra work in the management layer.
Can we spell out what are these resources?
CPR definitely relies on completely shared memory. That's already not a
concern.
CPR resolves resources that are bound to devices like VFIO by passing over
FDs, these are not over commited either.
Is it accounting QEMU/KVM process overhead? That would really be trivial,
IMHO, but maybe something else?
Accounting is one issue, and it is not trivial. Another is arranging exclusive
use of a set of CPUs, the same set for the old and new container, concurrently.
Another is avoiding namespace conflicts, the kind that make localhost migration
difficult.
This is one reason why a cloud provider may prefer cpr-exec. A second reason
is that the container may include agents with their own connections to the
outside world, and such connections remain intact if the container is reused.
We discussed about this one. Personally I still cannot understand why this
is a concern if the agents can be trivially started as a new instance. But
I admit I may not know the whole picture. To me, the above point is more
persuasive, but I'll need to understand which part that is over-commited
that can be a problem.
Agents can be restarted, but that would sever the connection to the outside
world. With cpr-transfer or any local migration, you would need agents
outside of old and new containers that persist.
With cpr-exec, connections can be preserved without requiring the end user
to reconnect, and can be done trivially, by preserving chardevs. With that
support in qemu, the management layer does nothing extra to preserve them.
chardev support is not part of this series but is part of my vision,
and makes exec mode even more compelling.
Management layers have a lot of code and complexity to manage live migration,
resources, and connections. It requires modification to support cpr-transfer.
All that can be bypassed with exec mode. Less complexity, less maintainance,
and fewer points of failure. I know this because I implemented exec mode in
OCI at Oracle, and we use it in production.
After all, cloud hosts should preserve some extra memory anyway to make
sure dynamic resources allocations all the time (e.g., when live migration
starts, KVM pgtables can drastically increase if huge pages are enabled,
for PAGE_SIZE trackings), I assumed the over-commit portion should be less
that those.. and when it's also temporary (src QEMU will release all
resources after live upgrade) then it looks manageable. >>
How?
cpr-exec preserves descriptors across exec by clearing the CLOEXEC flag,
and by sending the unique name and value of each descriptor to new QEMU
via CPR state.
CPR state cannot be sent over the normal migration channel, because devices
and backends are created prior to reading the channel, so this mode sends
CPR state over a second migration channel that is not visible to the user.
New QEMU reads the second channel prior to creating devices or backends.
The exec itself is trivial. After writing to the migration channels, the
migration code calls a new main-loop hook to perform the exec.
Example:
In this example, we simply restart the same version of QEMU, but in
a real scenario one would use a new QEMU binary path in cpr-exec-command.
# qemu-kvm -monitor stdio
-object memory-backend-memfd,id=ram0,size=1G
-machine memory-backend=ram0 -machine aux-ram-share=on ...
QEMU 10.1.50 monitor - type 'help' for more information
(qemu) info status
VM status: running
(qemu) migrate_set_parameter mode cpr-exec
(qemu) migrate_set_parameter cpr-exec-command qemu-kvm ... -incoming
file:vm.state
(qemu) migrate -d file:vm.state
(qemu) QEMU 10.1.50 monitor - type 'help' for more information
(qemu) info status
VM status: running
Steve Sistare (9):
migration: multi-mode notifier
migration: add cpr_walk_fd
oslib: qemu_clear_cloexec
vl: helper to request exec
migration: cpr-exec-command parameter
migration: cpr-exec save and load
migration: cpr-exec mode
migration: cpr-exec docs
vfio: cpr-exec mode
The other thing is, as Vladimir is working on (looks like) a cleaner way of
passing FDs fully relying on unix sockets, I want to understand better on
the relationships of his work and the exec model.
His work is based on my work -- the ability to embed a file descriptor in a
migration stream with a VMSTATE_FD declaration -- so it is compatible.
The cpr-exec series preserves VMSTATE_FD across exec by remembering the fd
integer and embedding that in the data stream. See the changes in
vmstate-types.c
in [PATCH V3 7/9] migration: cpr-exec mode.
Thus cpr-exec will still preserve tap devices via Vladimir's code.
I still personally think we should always stick with unix sockets, but I'm
open to be convinced on above limitations. If exec is better than
cpr-transfer in any way, the hope is more people can and should adopt it.
Various people and companies have expressed interest in CPR and want to explore
cpr-exec. Vladimir was one, he chose transfer instead, and that is fine, but
give people the option. And Oracle continues to use cpr-exec mode.
There is no downside to supporting cpr-exec mode. It is astonishing how much
code is shared by the cpr-transfer and cpr-exec modes. Most of the code in
this series is factored into specific cpr-exec files and functions, code that
will never run for any other reason. There are very few conditionals in common
code that do something different for exec mode.
We also have no answer yet on how cpr-exec can resolve container world with
seccomp forbidding exec. I guess that's a no-go. It's definitely a
downside instead. Better mention that in the cover letter.
The key is limiting the contents of the container, so exec only has a limited
and known safe set of things to target. I'll add that to the cover letter.
- Steve
