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Michal Privoznik f931cb7f21 conf: Introduce virtio-mem <memory/> model
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>
2021-10-01 11:02:53 +02:00
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README.rst

.. image:: https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/badges/master/pipeline.svg
     :target: https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/pipelines
     :alt: GitLab CI Build Status
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     :target: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects/355
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.. image:: https://translate.fedoraproject.org/widgets/libvirt/-/libvirt/svg-badge.svg
     :target: https://translate.fedoraproject.org/engage/libvirt/
     :alt: Translation status

==============================
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:

https://libvirt.org


License
=======

The libvirt C API is distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser General
Public License, version 2.1 (or later). Some parts of the code that are
not part of the C library may have the more restrictive GNU General
Public License, version 2.0 (or later). See the files ``COPYING.LESSER``
and ``COPYING`` for full license terms & conditions.


Installation
============

Instructions on building and installing libvirt can be found on the website:

https://libvirt.org/compiling.html

Contributing
============

The libvirt project welcomes contributions in many ways. For most components
the best way to contribute is to send patches to the primary development
mailing list. Further guidance on this can be found on the website:

https://libvirt.org/contribute.html


Contact
=======

The libvirt project has two primary mailing lists:

* libvirt-users@redhat.com (**for user discussions**)
* libvir-list@redhat.com (**for development only**)

Further details on contacting the project are available on the website:

https://libvirt.org/contact.html