On 02.11.19 11:32, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Fri, Nov 01, 2019 at 06:43:16PM +0100, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
On the KVM forum I have discussed the default cpu model mode on s390.
Right now if the xml does not specify anything, libvirt defaults to
not specifying anything on the qemu command line (no -cpu statement)
which is the equivalent of -cpu host for s390 which is equivalent to
host-passthrough. While this enables all features it does not provide
any migration safety by default.
So in fact we are kind of "broken" right now when it comes to safery.
So we discussed that it would make sense that an empty xml should actually
be defaulted to host-model, which results in - as of today - the same guest
features but in a migration safe way.
There is another change planned right now to actually make the cpu model
present in an xml if none was specified. So we could actually do this change
before, together or after te other. Jiri and I think it probably makes most
sense to have both changes at the same time (in terms of libvirt version).
Does anyone see an issue with changing the default model mode to "host-model"
if the xml does not specify anything else?
Changing from "host-passthrough" to "host-model" is not a huge difference,
but it is none the less a guest ABI change. "host-passthrough" doesn't
provide migration safety in the face of differing hardware, it should still
be valid for people with homogeneous hardware. So changing the model will
potentially break some existing usage.
I guess on s390x this is not the case ("-cpu host", no "-cpu", and
passing the expanded "host" model will result in the same guest ABI, in
contrast to x86 AFAIK). There is this special case, though, where we
have old QEMUs without CPU model support. Not sure how to deal with
that, then.
As the top priority we should definitely make sure that the guest XML
gets updated to list "host-passthrough" when no CPU is specified, so
that it reflects the current reality. If libvirt gets this information
+1 to that
from QEMU, then at some point down the line we can potentially change
the default by tieing a new default to a versioned machine type. We
have to wait a little while for old libvirt's to become irrelevant
wrt new QEMU though. This is the same issue with changing the default
CPU on x86 which, though that's possibly harder on x86 as the scope of
any change is more significant.
--
Thanks,
David / dhildenb
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