On Wed, 3 Aug 2022 18:34:45 +0100 Daniel P. Berrangé <berra...@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 03, 2022 at 07:31:41PM +0200, Claudio Imbrenda wrote: > > This patch adds support for asynchronously tearing down a VM on Linux. > > > > When qemu terminates, either naturally or because of a fatal signal, > > the VM is torn down. If the VM is huge, it can take a considerable > > amount of time for it to be cleaned up. In case of a protected VM, it > > might take even longer than a non-protected VM (this is the case on > > s390x, for example). > > > > Some users might want to shut down a VM and restart it immediately, > > without having to wait. This is especially true if management > > infrastructure like libvirt is used. > > > > This patch implements a simple trick on Linux to allow qemu to return > > immediately, with the teardown of the VM being performed > > asynchronously. > > > > If the new commandline option -async-teardown is used, a new process is > > spawned from qemu at startup, using the clone syscall, in such way that > > it will share its address space with qemu. > > > > The new process will then simpy wait until qemu terminates, and then it > > will exit itself. > > > > This allows qemu to terminate quickly, without having to wait for the > > whole address space to be torn down. The teardown process will exit > > after qemu, so it will be the last user of the address space, and > > therefore it will take care of the actual teardown. > > > > The teardown process will share the same cgroups as qemu, so both > > memory usage and cpu time will be accounted properly. > > > > This feature can already be used with libvirt by adding the following > > to the XML domain definition: > > > > <commandline xmlns="http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0"> > > <arg value='-async-teardown'/> > > </commandline> > > How does this work in practice ? Libvirt should be blocking until I don't know the inner details of how libvirt works.. > all processes in the cgroup have exited, including this cloned > child process. ..but I tested it and it works my impression is that libvirt by default is only waiting for the main qemu process. the only issue I have found is the log file, which stays open as long as some file descriptors (which the cloned process inherits from the main qemu process) stay open. A new VM cannot be started if its log file is still open by the logger process. The close_range() call solves the issue. > > With regards, > Daniel