On 08/03/2016 04:49 PM, Eduardo Habkost wrote:

Hi,

I am collecting some material for my KVM Forum talk, and I am interested in hearing from libvirt developers about instances where machine-type-specific information is needed by libvirt, and the info is not provided by QEMU.

I found some instances where machine-type capabilities are hardcoded in libvirt itself (see below[1]), but I would like to know if you have other examples. They may be about things that are already done by libvirt today, or about things that you would like to do in the future.

(I'm guessing this first one may be what put you onto the topic in the first place, but for completeness' sake...) Without actually instantiating a virtual machine of a particular type, It's not possible to know whether that machinetype has a legacy-pci root bus, or a PCIe root complex (or neither). This means we have to guess, and it has big implications. In some cases our guess is 100% correct (i440fx and q35 machinetypes inqemu-system-x86_64) but in other cases we may or may not be right (the aarch64 "virt" machinetype, which as I understand may or may not have a PCIe root complex, depending on the qemu version?) This in turn leads to differences in which PCI controllers are available for a machinetype (e.g., even though the ioh3420 (pcie-root-port) device is advertised as available in qemu-system_x86_64, it's only actually usable for q35-based machinetypes; same for pxb-pcie, and the xio3130 upstream/downstream ports. Same thing goes for some other integrated devices - Q35-based machinetypes include an AHCI controller while i440fx machinetypes (as well as "sun4u" and "g3beige") include an IDE controller, and these are at fixed addresses (and can't be removed). And then there is the Q35 machinetype vs. fdc. Yeah, sure nobody in this age should be using a floppy disk (even emulated), but even within different versions of the q35 machinetype, a floppy disk controller may or may not be present (see qemuDominMachineNeedsFDC()). You may say that libvirt could solve this problem when probing qemu capabilities by simply instantiating a virtual machine and then examining its devices, but (I've been told) this is too expensive (especially since we'd need to do it for every machinetype that was used, although admittedly we've been caching the results for quite awhile now, so the impact may not be as great as it once was).

[1] Examples where machine-type names are hardcoded in libvirt:

Keep in mind that some of those places we're checking os.machine are actually utility functions whose only job is to check the machinetype and return true/false, and they're called from several other places. For example qemuDomainMachineIsQ35(), qemuDomainMachineIs440FX(), and qeuDomainMachineIsVirt() (which actually checks if the arch is armv7l or aarch64 *and* machinetype is "virt*"). Which points out - it's a slightly different issue (since in these cases at least it's a different qemu binary), but you may also want to look at places where we examine "os.arch" and make a decision based on that.

src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "ppce500")) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "prep")) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "bamboo")) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: if (STREQ(def->os.machine, "mpc8544ds")) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: if (STREQ(machines[i]->name, "none")) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "isapc"); src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: (STRNEQ(machine, "pseries") && !STRPREFIX(machine, "pseries-"))) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: (STRNEQ(machine, "pseries") && !STRPREFIX(machine, "pseries-"))) src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: if (STRNEQ(domCaps->machine, "virt") && src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c: !STRPREFIX(domCaps->machine, "virt-")) src/qemu/qemu_command.c: if (STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "s390-virtio") && src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: if (STREQ(def->os.machine, "isapc")) { src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: if (STREQ(def->os.machine, "versatilepb")) src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: return (STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "pc-q35") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "q35")); src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: return (STREQ(def->os.machine, "pc") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "pc-0.") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "pc-1.") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "pc-i440") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "rhel")); src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: char *p = STRSKIP(def->os.machine, "pc-q35-"); src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: return STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "s390-ccw"); src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: if (STRNEQ(def->os.machine, "virt") && src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: !STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "virt-")) src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: if (STRNEQ(def->os.machine, "pseries") && src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: !STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "pseries-")) src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "malta") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "sun4u") || src/qemu/qemu_domain.c: STREQ(def->os.machine, "g3beige"); src/qemu/qemu_domain_address.c: if (!(STRPREFIX(def->os.machine, "vexpress-") || src/qemu/qemu_domain_address.c: if (STREQ(def->os.machine, "versatilepb"))