Oracle Working On Multi-Threaded VFIO Page Pinning For ~10x Faster QEMU Initialization

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Working On Multi-Threaded VFIO Page Pinning For ~10x Faster QEMU Initialization

For those assigning VFIO devices to guest virtual machines, the initialization/start-up process may soon be much faster with a set of patches volleyed by Oracle...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VFIO-Multi-Thread-Pinning

[zexelon]

Optimization is always awesome but random question what is the impact of this if it only affects initialization? I am probably missing something where this is highly useful to say cloud providers, but on the systems that I run QEMU takes all of about 1 second to initialize and then its Tiano core that takes a bit longer before the OS starts to hog all the resources.

[dragorth]

Optimization is always awesome but random question what is the impact of this if it only affects initialization? I am probably missing something where this is highly useful to say cloud providers, but on the systems that I run QEMU takes all of about 1 second to initialize and then its Tiano core that takes a bit longer before the OS starts to hog all the resources.

Cloud is the obvious answer, but also picture reboots due to various reasons. Booting large numbers of machines at startup can take quite a bit of time. Finally, bringing up new nodes and transferring VMs should benefit from this as well, I would think.

[CommunityMember]

I am probably missing something where this is highly useful to say cloud providers

This is primarily a huge win for the hyperscalers (cloud, et.al.) that have huge memory systems, and a huge number of CPUs, and huge memory/CPU VMs with various devices that support virtual sub-devices for isolation and security (Ethernet, GPU, and AI accelerators are the best known, of course). Desktop (and small business servers) are not going to see any substantive improvements today, but the improvements may make it so they will not see as much degradation as they otherwise would has they approach the larger scale(s) in a decade or three.

[SteamPunker]

Interesting. So how does this jive with their ownership and continued support of VirtualBox?

[Quackdoc]

this is really nice. I clench my butt a little when I spend all day debugging a nee vfio setup (montery) when waiting to see if it will work, a good chunk of time is spent waiting for init. (it usually doesn't)

it will give my behind some much needed relief LOL

[easy]

I think this can be used for something like AWS lambda AWS docker and AWS lambda uses firecracker micro vm

https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/