These two patches add support for making the libvirtd daemon multithreaded in its dispatch of client requests. Any single client still has all its requests serialized - since a virConnectPtr instance is only allowed to be used from a single thread. Multiple clients though can now be processed in parallel without blocking each other.
NB, these patches are not intended to be applied yet. They are *unsafe* untill the stateful drivers (QEMU, LXC, OpenVZ, Test) get suitable mutex locking. I've nearly got those drivers done and will post for review in the near future. The description that follows is also added to CVS as qemud/THREADING.txt for reference: - the top level lock is on 'struct qemud_server'. This must be held before acquiring any other lock - Each 'struct qemud_client' object has a lock. The server lock must be held before acquiring it. Once the client lock is acquired the server lock can (optionally) be dropped. - The event loop has its own self-contained lock. You can ignore this as a caller of virEvent APIs. The server lock is only needed / used once the daemon has entered its main loop, which is the qemudRunLoop() . The initial thread acquires the lock upon entering this method. It immediatelty spawns 'n' worker threads, whose main loop is the qemudWorker() method. The workers will immediately try to acquire the server lock, and thus block since its held by the initial thread. When the initial thread enters the poll() call, it drops the server lock. The worker locks now each wakeup, acquire the server lock and go into a condition wait on the 'job' condition variable. The workers are now all 'primed' for incoming RPC calls. A file descriptor event now occurrs, causing the initial thread to exit poll(). It invokes the registered callback associated with the file descriptors on which the event occurrs. The callbacks are required to immediately acquire the server lock. If the callback is dealing with a client event, it will then acquire the client lock, and drop the server lock. The callback will now handle the I/O event, reading or writing a RPC message. Once a complete RPC message has been read the client is marked as being in state QEMUD_MODE_WAIT_DISPATCH, and the 'job' condition variable is signaled. The callback now drops the client lock and goes back into the poll() loop waiting for more I/O events. Meanwhile one of the worker threads wakes up from its condition variable sleep, holding the server lock. It now searches for a client in state QEMUD_MODE_WAIT_DISPATCH. If it doesn't find one, it goes back to sleep. If it does find one, then it calls into the remoteDispatchClientRequest() method de-serialize the incoming message into an XDR object and invoke the helper method for the associated RPC call. While the helper method is executing, no locks are held on either the client or server, but the ref count on the 'struct qemud_client' object is incremented to ensure its not deleted. The helper can now safely invoke the neccessary libvirt API call. Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- Libvir-list mailing list Libvir-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list
