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authorJing Zhang <jingzhangos@google.com>2021-06-18 22:27:07 +0000
committerPaolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>2021-06-24 18:00:23 -0400
commitfdc09ddd40645b0e3f245e4512fd4b4c34cde5e5 (patch)
treec674af710249e20ff29734bc0daafcfcbf6ad0aa /virt
parentce55c049459cff0034cc1bcfdce3bf343a2d6317 (diff)
KVM: stats: Add documentation for binary statistics interface
This new API provides a file descriptor for every VM and VCPU to read KVM statistics data in binary format. It is meant to provide a lightweight, flexible, scalable and efficient lock-free solution for user space telemetry applications to pull the statistics data periodically for large scale systems. The pulling frequency could be as high as a few times per second. The statistics descriptors are defined by KVM in kernel and can be by userspace to discover VM/VCPU statistics during the one-time setup stage. The statistics data itself could be read out by userspace telemetry periodically without any extra parsing or setup effort. There are a few existed interface protocols and definitions, but no one can fulfil all the requirements this interface implemented as below: 1. During high frequency periodic stats reading, there should be no extra efforts except the stats data read itself. 2. Support stats annotation, like type (cumulative, instantaneous, peak, histogram, etc) and unit (counter, time, size, cycles, etc). 3. The stats data reading should be free of lock/synchronization. We don't care about the consistency between all the stats data. All stats data can not be read out at exactly the same time. We really care about the change or trend of the stats data. The lock-free solution is not just for efficiency and scalability, also for the stats data accuracy and usability. For example, in the situation that all the stats data readings are protected by a global lock, if one VCPU died somehow with that lock held, then all stats data reading would be blocked, then we have no way from stats data that which VCPU has died. 4. The stats data reading workload can be handed over to other unprivileged process. Reviewed-by: David Matlack <dmatlack@google.com> Reviewed-by: Ricardo Koller <ricarkol@google.com> Reviewed-by: Krish Sadhukhan <krish.sadhukhan@oracle.com> Reviewed-by: Fuad Tabba <tabba@google.com> Signed-off-by: Jing Zhang <jingzhangos@google.com> Message-Id: <20210618222709.1858088-6-jingzhangos@google.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
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