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illumos-kvm: KVM for illumos
KVM is the kernel virtual machine, a framework for the in-kernel acceleration of QEMU. illumos-kvm is a port of KVM to illumos, taking advantage of illumos-specific constructs like DTrace, cyclics, mdb, kstat, OS virtualization, network virtualization, ZFS, etc. It is derived from the KVM source for Linux 2.6.34, the longterm source for which may be found here:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/longterm/linux-2.6.34.y.git
To date, this implementation has been verified with a wide range of guest operating systems including illumos itself (both SmartOS and OpenIndiana distributions), FreeBSD, Plan 9, QNX, ChromeOS, HaikuOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux.
The design center for this work is to use the virtualization features made available in the microprocessor -- and in particular, Intel's VMX. As such, behavior on microprocessors that do not support VMX -- and more specifically, the extended page tables (EPT) found in second generation VMX support -- should be graceful failure, not degraded operation.
Divergences from KVM
Divergences from KVM fall into several broad categories: some functionality has been removed or not implemented because it is obviated by features of illumos (e.g., the custom tracing facility built into KVM); some functionality has been removed because it is only relevant to hardware that lacks virtualization support (e.g., older x86 hardware) or on hardware for which illumos lacks support (e.g., PPC, s390); and some functionality has been removed because the implementation complexity was simply too great relative to its value.
Of this latter category, three areas of divergence merit special note. First, there is no support for pageable guest memory (that is, guest memory is locked down). While this is an opinionated decision at some level (in our experience, memory oversell leads to unacceptable pathologies in all but the idlest of workloads), we would welcome the work to integrate the KVM MMU notifier support into illumos-kvm.
Second (and relatedly), illumos itself has no support for kernel same-page mapping (KSM) as found in Linux. While illumos could in principle add such support, it is our experience that the memory that accrues from this is not sufficiently significant to pay for the increase in implementation and operator complexity.
Finally, there is no support currently for AMD SVM. This is not a value judgement of AMD's technology, but rather a reflection of limited engineering and testing resources. (In the spirit of full disclosure, it should be said that the sponsor of illumos-kvm, Joyent, is an Intel-funded company -- but the lack of AMD support reflects only engineering prioritization and lack of testing infrastructure; AMD SVM support would be most welcome should someone in the community be so motivated as to port and test it.)
Building illumos-kvm
Preparation
Edit the Makefile and appropriately set the path for the KERNEL_SOURCE
directory to point to the root of a checked out and built illumos directory.
Building illumos KVM requires several recent additions to illumos,
so be sure your illumos is up to date.
Verify that you have gcc 4.4.4 installed that is used to build illumos. If you are not building this with SmartOS, you may need to modify the Makefile such that CC is pointing to the correct gcc.
Verify that you either have SUNWmake or GNU make installed.
Building
To build, simply use the default make target:
$ make
To check style, header files, and other various nits:
$ make check
Installing illumos-kvm
System requirements
To run illumos-kvm, you will need an illumos that has the fix for issue
1347 (integrated on 2011-08-11). Further, your machine will need to
support VMX. To see if your machine supports VMX, run isainfo -v and
look for vmx, e.g.:
% isainfo -v
64-bit amd64 applications
vmx sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx
cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu
32-bit i386 applications
vmx sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx
cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu
If you do not see vmx in this output, the kvm driver will be unable to
attach.
Required binaries
There are two mandatory artifacts to install, and two optional component:
kvmis the driver itselfkvm.confis the driver configuration filekvm.sois the mdb moduleJOY_kvm_link.sois the devfsadm plugin
On the target machine, place kvm in /kernel/drv/amd64 and kvm.conf
in /kernel/drv. Place JOY_kvm_link.so in /usr/lib/devfsadm/linkmod then:
# add_drv kvm
You can verify that the driver installed and attached properly by checking for its presence in /dev.
# ls -l /dev/kvm
Running illumos-kvm
To run KVM, you will need the build product of the illumos-kvm-cmd repo:
qemu-system-x86_64; please follow the instructions in the illumos-kvm-cmd
repo to execute QEMU such that KVM is enabled.
Monitoring illumos-kvm
Once one or more VMs are running, there is a variety of tooling to help understand the operating characteristics of the system.
kvmstat
The kvmstat command, found in the illumos repository, can be used to monitor
VMs. For example, here is one second of kvmstat output from a machine
running two VMs (one 2 VCPU instance running Linux; another 4 VCPU instance
running the illumos-derived SmartOS):
pid vcpu | exits : haltx irqx irqwx iox mmiox | irqs emul eptv
4668 0 | 23 : 6 0 0 1 0 | 6 16 0
4668 1 | 25 : 6 1 0 1 0 | 6 16 0
5026 0 | 17833 : 223 2946 707 106 0 | 3379 13315 0
5026 1 | 18687 : 244 2761 512 0 0 | 3085 14803 0
5026 2 | 15696 : 194 3452 542 0 0 | 3568 11230 0
5026 3 | 16822 : 244 2817 487 0 0 | 3100 12963 0
As for the meaning of the columns, they are explained with kvmstat -h:
# kvmstat -h
Usage: kvmstat [interval [count]]
Displays statistics for running kernel virtual machines, with one line
per virtual CPU. All statistics are reported as per-second rates.
The columns are as follows:
pid => identifier of process controlling the virtual CPU
vcpu => virtual CPU identifier relative to its virtual machine
exits => virtual machine exits for the virtual CPU
haltx => virtual machine exits due to the HLT instruction
irqx => virtual machine exits due to a pending external interrupt
irqwx => virtual machine exits due to an open interrupt window
iox => virtual machine exits due to an I/O instruction
mmiox => virtual machine exits due to memory mapped I/O
irqs => interrupts injected into the virtual CPU
emul => instructions emulated in the kernel
eptv => extended page table violations
kstat
As one might expect, kvmstat is implemented in terms of kstat. You
can use kstat(1) to browse the kstats from the kvm module:
# kstat -m kvm
...
module: kvm instance: 0
name: vcpu-4 class: misc
crtime 4407.142410068
exits 5367443
fpu-reload 57302
halt-exits 317275
halt-wakeup 8991
host-state-reload 503920
hypercalls 0
insn-emulation 3043881
inst-emulation-fail 0
invlpg 0
io-exits 237191
irq-exits 1668
irq-injections 320339
irq-window-exits 1635
mmio-exits 617
nmi-injections 0
nmi-window-exits 0
pf-fixed 163629
pf-guest 0
pid 3949
request-irq-exits 0
signal-exits 460
snaptime 43219.723435123
zonename global
module: kvm instance: 4
name: vm class: misc
crtime 4407.1241134
lpages 0
mmu-cache-miss 950
mmu-flooded 0
mmu-pte-updated 0
mmu-pte-write 56360
mmu-pte-zapped 0
mmu-recycled 0
mmu-unsync-page 0
pid 3949
remote-tlb-flush 1511
snaptime 43219.723875091
zonename global
DTrace
While there is not currently a stable KVM provider, there are many SDT probes
in KVM; dtrace -l -m sdt:kvm to list these.
Of these, of particular note are the kvm-guest-entry and kvm-guest-exit
probes, which fire upon entry to and exit from a guest virtual machine. To
determine context, one can use the vmregs variable present in illumos.
For example, here's a simple script that shows histograms of time spent in VM guests on a per-PID and per-VCPU basis:
#pragma D option quiet
kvm-guest-entry
{
self->entry = timestamp;
}
kvm-guest-exit
/self->entry/
{
@[pid, vmregs[VMX_VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_ID]] =
quantize(timestamp - self->entry);
}
END
{
printa("pid %d, vcpu %d: %@d\n", @);
}
Here's what the output of running the above might look like:
pid 3949, vcpu 1:
value ------------- Distribution ------------- count
512 | 0
1024 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 26805
2048 |@@@@@ 11641
4096 |@@@@@@@ 14187
8192 |@ 1559
16384 |@ 2931
32768 |@@@ 5653
65536 |@@@@ 8385
131072 |@@@ 6926
262144 |@@@ 6639
524288 | 785
1048576 | 0
There are many other ways in which DTrace can be used to understand either
host or guest behavior; see the tools subdirectory from some sample D
scripts.
mdb
The kvm.so build product is an mdb module that contains several useful
commands, including a kvm walker to iterate over all struct kvm
structures.
Contributing to illumos-kvm
Unless and until its volume dictate that it be elsewhere, illumos KVM
discussion should be on the illumos-developer mailing list.
Contributions are happily accepted; please send patches to
illumos-developer.