While we are at it add a brief preamble that explains some of the common concepts in QEMU's device emulation which will hopefully lead to less confusing about our dizzying command line options. Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> Reviewed-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> Cc: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com> Message-Id: <20210720232703.10650-3-alex.bennee@linaro.org>
65 lines
2.2 KiB
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65 lines
2.2 KiB
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.. _pcsys_005fivshmem:
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Inter-VM Shared Memory device
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-----------------------------
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On Linux hosts, a shared memory device is available. The basic syntax
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is:
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.. parsed-literal::
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|qemu_system_x86| -device ivshmem-plain,memdev=hostmem
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where hostmem names a host memory backend. For a POSIX shared memory
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backend, use something like
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::
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-object memory-backend-file,size=1M,share,mem-path=/dev/shm/ivshmem,id=hostmem
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If desired, interrupts can be sent between guest VMs accessing the same
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shared memory region. Interrupt support requires using a shared memory
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server and using a chardev socket to connect to it. The code for the
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shared memory server is qemu.git/contrib/ivshmem-server. An example
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syntax when using the shared memory server is:
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.. parsed-literal::
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# First start the ivshmem server once and for all
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ivshmem-server -p pidfile -S path -m shm-name -l shm-size -n vectors
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# Then start your qemu instances with matching arguments
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|qemu_system_x86| -device ivshmem-doorbell,vectors=vectors,chardev=id
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-chardev socket,path=path,id=id
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When using the server, the guest will be assigned a VM ID (>=0) that
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allows guests using the same server to communicate via interrupts.
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Guests can read their VM ID from a device register (see
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ivshmem-spec.txt).
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Migration with ivshmem
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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With device property ``master=on``, the guest will copy the shared
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memory on migration to the destination host. With ``master=off``, the
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guest will not be able to migrate with the device attached. In the
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latter case, the device should be detached and then reattached after
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migration using the PCI hotplug support.
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At most one of the devices sharing the same memory can be master. The
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master must complete migration before you plug back the other devices.
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ivshmem and hugepages
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Instead of specifying the <shm size> using POSIX shm, you may specify a
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memory backend that has hugepage support:
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.. parsed-literal::
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|qemu_system_x86| -object memory-backend-file,size=1G,mem-path=/dev/hugepages/my-shmem-file,share,id=mb1
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-device ivshmem-plain,memdev=mb1
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ivshmem-server also supports hugepages mount points with the ``-m``
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memory path argument.
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