f931cb7f21
The virtio-mem is paravirtualized mechanism of adding/removing
memory to/from a VM. A virtio-mem-pci device is split into blocks
of equal size which are then exposed (all or only a requested
portion of them) to the guest kernel to use as regular memory.
Therefore, the device has two important attributes:
1) block-size, which defines the size of a block
2) requested-size, which defines how much memory (in bytes)
is the device requested to expose to the guest.
The 'block-size' is configured on command line and immutable
throughout device's lifetime. The 'requested-size' can be set on
the command line too, but also is adjustable via monitor. In
fact, that is how management software places its requests to
change the memory allocation. If it wants to give more memory to
the guest it changes 'requested-size' to a bigger value, and if it
wants to shrink guest memory it changes the 'requested-size' to a
smaller value. Note, value of zero means that guest should
release all memory offered by the device. Of course, guest has to
cooperate. Therefore, there is a third attribute 'size' which is
read only and reflects how much memory the guest still has. This
can be different to 'requested-size', obviously. Because of name
clash, I've named it 'current' and it is dealt with in future
commits (it is a runtime information anyway).
In the backend, memory for virtio-mem is backed by usual objects:
memory-backend-{ram,file,memfd} and their size puts the cap on
the amount of memory that a virtio-mem device can offer to a
guest. But we are already able to express this info using <size/>
under <target/>.
Therefore, we need only two more elements to cover 'block-size'
and 'requested-size' attributes. This is the XML I've came up
with:
<memory model='virtio-mem'>
<source>
<nodemask>1-3</nodemask>
<pagesize unit='KiB'>2048</pagesize>
</source>
<target>
<size unit='KiB'>2097152</size>
<node>0</node>
<block unit='KiB'>2048</block>
<requested unit='KiB'>1048576</requested>
</target>
<address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x04' function='0x0'/>
</memory>
I hope by now it is obvious that:
1) 'requested-size' must be an integer multiple of
'block-size', and
2) virtio-mem-pci device goes onto PCI bus and thus needs PCI
address.
Then there is a limitation that the minimal 'block-size' is
transparent huge page size (I'll leave this without explanation).
Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Ján Tomko <jtomko@redhat.com>
Libvirt API for virtualization
Libvirt provides a portable, long term stable C API for managing the virtualization technologies provided by many operating systems. It includes support for QEMU, KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, Virtuozzo, VMware vCenter and ESX, VMware Desktop, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and the POWER Hypervisor.
For some of these hypervisors, it provides a stateful management daemon which runs on the virtualization host allowing access to the API both by non-privileged local users and remote users.
Layered packages provide bindings of the libvirt C API into other languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, OCaml, as well as mappings into object systems such as GObject, CIM and SNMP.
Further information about the libvirt project can be found on the website:
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