Skip to content
Commit 9476654b authored by Paul Durrant's avatar Paul Durrant Committed by David S. Miller
Browse files

xen-netback: support dynamic unbind/bind



By re-attaching RX, TX, and CTL rings during connect() rather than
assuming they are freshly allocated (i.e. assuming the counters are zero),
and avoiding forcing state to Closed in netback_remove() it is possible
for vif instances to be unbound and re-bound from and to (respectively) a
running guest.

Dynamic unbind/bind is a highly useful feature for a backend module as it
allows it to be unloaded and re-loaded (i.e. updated) without requiring
domUs to be halted.

This has been tested by running iperf as a server in the test VM and
then running a client against it in a continuous loop, whilst also
running:

while true;
  do echo vif-$DOMID-$VIF >unbind;
  echo down;
  rmmod xen-netback;
  echo unloaded;
  modprobe xen-netback;
  cd $(pwd);
  brctl addif xenbr0 vif$DOMID.$VIF;
  ip link set vif$DOMID.$VIF up;
  echo up;
  sleep 5;
  done

in dom0 from /sys/bus/xen-backend/drivers/vif to continuously unbind,
unload, re-load, re-bind and re-plumb the backend.

Clearly a performance drop was seen but no TCP connection resets were
observed during this test and moreover a parallel SSH connection into the
guest remained perfectly usable throughout.

Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Durrant <pdurrant@amazon.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarWei Liu <wei.liu@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parent 8d347992
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment