Re: [Libvir] Extending libvirt to probe NUMA topology

On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 09:52:46PM -0400, beth kon wrote: > Daniel, > > I'm taking a stab at this work and want to be sure I'm taking the right > approach. I'm new to xen and even newer to libvirt, so have a bit of a > learning curve.

> For the topology information, I assume that this will be a call through > xend, similar to xenDaemonNodeGetInfo. It would seem natural to somehow > extend the xenDaemonNodeGetInfo with this additional information except > that you suggested having the output in XML. Can you explain why you > chose XML? We have to maintain 100% ABI & API compatability against older releases of libvirt. This means that once we add a function, struct or other definition in the header files it cannot ever be changed again. So this means we can't change the virNodeInfo struct to add NUMA info. For this reason we tend to keep struct's just for use in APIs where the performance is critical, or data set is unlikely to ever change. So far we only use structs for virDomainInfo, virNodeInfo, virSchedParam and virVcpuInfo at this time. For more descriptive data we format information into an XML document. This makes it very easy to add new XML elements and attributes to represent new data items. The same compatability rules apply to XML though - once we add an attribute or element it can never be removed from the spec. Currently we think putting the NUMA info into XML is the best approach since it is not performance critical. There are two ways to implement it with Xen - either talk to XenD and extract the topology there, or make direct hypercalls. For now it is probably easiest to talk to XenD, since this isn't performance critical.