DPDK Userspace 2019, Bordeaux

This talk will present what I did to implement the Virtio failover feature to QEMU and what our ideas are to bring it to QEMU. I will most likely not present an already implemented solution but my ideas on how to do it in DPDK. I hope to spark a discussion and get some feedback from the DPDK community.

A description of the failover feature: Virtio has a feature to enable VMs that have a PT (pass-through) device plugged for fast transmission of data to be live migrated to another host system. For this, a pair of NICs is specified as a failover group. The fastPT NIC is called the primary interface and a second paravirtualized (PV) NIC (virtio-net) is called the standby device. When both virtio front- and backend support this feature, live migration is done by first unplugging the fast-path NIC and then have the (slower) virtio-net device take over the data path. This means that only the virtio-net device needs to be live migrated and we already have support for that.  After migration is completed a PT device is plugged to the target VM and the data path can be switched over from the PV to the PT device.  A more detailed discussion of the feature can be found here: https://mstsirkin.blogspot.com/2019/03/virtio-network-device-failover-support.html?m=1