diff options
| author | Haozhong Zhang <haozhong.zhang@intel.com> | 2017-12-11 15:28:06 +0800 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com> | 2018-01-19 11:18:51 -0200 |
| commit | cb836434cda103fac3c06174e70bf5c9b7083b8e (patch) | |
| tree | dbdfa8f28c5c8bd9d9811e5395fd4c65a8764b04 /docs | |
| parent | da6789c27c2ea71765cfab04bad9a42b5426f0bd (diff) | |
nvdimm: add 'unarmed' option
Currently the only vNVDIMM backend can guarantee the guest write
persistence is device DAX on Linux, because no host-side kernel cache
is involved in the guest access to it. The approach to detect whether
the backend is device DAX needs to access sysfs, which may not work
with SELinux.
Instead, we add the 'unarmed' option to device 'nvdimm', so that users
or management utils, which have enough knowledge about the backend,
can control the unarmed flag in guest ACPI NFIT via this option. The
guest Linux NVDIMM driver, for example, will mark the corresponding
vNVDIMM device read-only if the unarmed flag in guest NFIT is set.
The default value of 'unarmed' option is 'off' in order to keep the
backwards compatibility.
Signed-off-by: Haozhong Zhang <haozhong.zhang@intel.com>
Message-Id: <20171211072806.2812-4-haozhong.zhang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'docs')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/nvdimm.txt | 15 |
1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/nvdimm.txt b/docs/nvdimm.txt index 21249dd062..e903d8bb09 100644 --- a/docs/nvdimm.txt +++ b/docs/nvdimm.txt @@ -138,3 +138,18 @@ backend of vNVDIMM: -object memory-backend-file,id=mem1,share=on,mem-path=/dev/dax0.0,size=4G,align=2M -device nvdimm,id=nvdimm1,memdev=mem1 + +Guest Data Persistence +---------------------- + +Though QEMU supports multiple types of vNVDIMM backends on Linux, +currently the only one that can guarantee the guest write persistence +is the device DAX on the real NVDIMM device (e.g., /dev/dax0.0), to +which all guest access do not involve any host-side kernel cache. + +When using other types of backends, it's suggested to set 'unarmed' +option of '-device nvdimm' to 'on', which sets the unarmed flag of the +guest NVDIMM region mapping structure. This unarmed flag indicates +guest software that this vNVDIMM device contains a region that cannot +accept persistent writes. In result, for example, the guest Linux +NVDIMM driver, marks such vNVDIMM device as read-only. |