[PATCH v4 00/11] migration: fast snapshot load
Aadeshveer Singh <[email protected]> Sat, 1 Aug 2026 08:06:17 +0530
| Newsgroups | org.nongnu.qemu-devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
This series implements a "fast snapshot load" mechanism to significantly reduce the perceived resume time of a VM from a snapshot file. Currently, resuming a VM from a snapshot file requires loading all RAM pages into the QEMU instance before execution begins. This extension allows the user to run the VM nearly instantly by loading only the required device states up front and loading RAM pages lazily, by trapping access to pages that have not yet been loaded. Using the Linux userfaultfd syscall, a fault thread catches all page faults caused by the guest and loads in the pages required to keep the VM running. Concurrently, an eager background thread iteratively loads all remaining pages into RAM so the guest does not have to depend on the fault thread indefinitely. Much of code is reused from postcopy for fault handling and precopy for reading mapped ram file. Implementation revolves around two threads named the fault thread and eager load thread. Fault thread as name suggests catches page faults by the guest and serves them using userfaultfd. Postcopy fault thread is reused but instead of requesting source for a page it loads the page directly by reading from file. In order to remove the dependency of guest on fault thread indefinitely the eager load thread loads in the entire RAM sequentially, and after iterating through the entire RAM signals fault thread to exit and calls cleanup. In order to prevent the case of a page being loaded twice(in the case when eager load thread is loading it and fault thread also tries to serve fault on same page) a bitmap called pending_bmap is used to track pages which are pending and not being loaded by any thread. Atomic operations on this bitmap allows coordination between threads to prevent any unwanted behaviours This patch series was tested on a single machine: host OS : Fedora 44 host RAM : 32GB DDR5(4KB pagesize) host CPU : Intel Ultra9 185H(22 cores, x86_64) Guests tested: - KVM enabled guest OS : Fedora 44 guest RAM : 16GB(4KB pagesize) guest CPU : 4 cores(x86_64) - emulated power PC guest OS : Debian 10 guest RAM : 2GB(64KB pagesize) guest CPU : 2 cores(ppc) - host using 2MB hugepages guest OS : Debian 13 guest RAM : 16GB(16KB pagesize) guest CPU : 4 cores(x86_64) Future direction: - Add support for multifd - Add support for vhost-user --- v3 -> v4 - Set errp in qemu_get_buffer_at on failing if file is in failure state to ensure errp is set if a function returns failure - Update logic for postcopy_mapped_ram_load_page in patch 7 to support all possibilities of guest and host pagesizes as pointed by Peter - This also improves on correctness by not relying on mapped ram filling zeropages with zero values as pointed by Peter - Simplified postcopy_ram_eager_load_thread logic in patch 8 for exit as suggested by Peter - Use a more generalized language in documentation overview as suggested by Peter - Added a check against vhost user in case of fast snapshot load in options.c(Patch 9) as suggested by Peter Aadeshveer Singh (11): migration: Propagate error in postcopy setup functions migration: Extract blocktime marking helper migration: Rename postcopy_listen_thread_bh migration: Use file_bmap for RAMBlock during incoming file load migration: Make qemu_get_buffer_at() thread-safe migration: add RAMBlock field and helper for fast snapshot load migration: add support for fault thread to load pages from disk migration: add eager load thread and setup for fast snapshot load migration: update capability conflict test for postcopy-ram+mapped-ram migration/tests: Add test for fast snapshot load docs/migration: Add documentation for fast snapshot load feature docs/devel/migration/fast-snapshot-load.rst | 82 +++++ docs/devel/migration/features.rst | 1 + include/qemu/notify.h | 2 + include/system/ramblock.h | 6 + migration/migration.c | 60 ++-- migration/migration.h | 5 + migration/options.c | 20 +- migration/postcopy-ram.c | 324 +++++++++++++++++--- migration/postcopy-ram.h | 8 +- migration/qemu-file.c | 11 +- migration/qemu-file.h | 4 +- migration/ram.c | 94 +++++- migration/savevm.c | 16 + migration/savevm.h | 2 + migration/trace-events | 2 + tests/qtest/migration/file-tests.c | 24 ++ tests/qtest/migration/misc-tests.c | 52 ---- util/notify.c | 5 + 18 files changed, 575 insertions(+), 143 deletions(-) create mode 100644 docs/devel/migration/fast-snapshot-load.rst -- 2.55.0