On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 12:02:31PM +0200, Cornelia Huck wrote:

So, do you know from the outset that there will be such a coupled
device? I.e., is it a property of the VM definition?

Can there be a 'prepared' virtio-net device that presents the STANDBY
feature even if there currently is no vfio-handled device available --
but making it possible to simply hotplug that device later?
Should it be possible to add a virtio/vfio pair later on?

Yes, that's the plan, more or less.

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I think Qemu should check if guest virtio-net supports this feature and
provide a mechanism for
an upper layer indicating if the STANDBY feature is successfully
negotiated or not.
The upper layer can then decide if it should hot plug a VF with the same
MAC and manage the 2 links.
If VF is successfully hot plugged, virtio-net link should be disabled.  

BTW I see no reason to do this last part. The role of the
standby device is to be always there.

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Did you even talk to upper layer management about it?
Just list the steps they need to do and you will see
that's a lot of machinery to manage by the upper layer.

What do we gain in flexibility? As far as I can see the
only gain is some resources saved for legacy VMs.

That's not a lot as tenant of the upper layer probably already has
at least a hunch that it's a new guest otherwise
why bother specifying the feature at all - you
save even more resources without it.
 

I am not all that familiar with how Qemu manages network devices. If we can
do all the
required management of the primary/standby devices within Qemu, that is
definitely a better
approach without upper layer involvement.  

Right. I would imagine in the extreme case the upper layer doesn't
have to be involved at all if QEMU manages all hot plug/unplug logic.
The management tool can supply passthrough device and virtio with the
same group UUID, QEMU auto-manages the presence of the primary, and
hot plug the device as needed before or after the migration.

I do not really see how you can manage that kind of stuff in QEMU only.

So right now failover is limited to pci passthrough devices only.
The idea is to realize the vfio device but not expose it
to guest. Have a separate command to expose it to guest.
Hotunplug would also hide it from guest but not unrealize it.

This will help ensure that e.g. on migration failure we can
re-expose the device without risk of running out of resources.
-- 
MST