[Xen-devel] A migration framework for external devices

[Stefan Berger <stefanb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello!

 As part of our off-list discussion
on how to migrate the virtual TPM in support of virtual machine migration
(live migration), we came up with the idea of having a migration framework
that could be used for general migration of 'external devices' such as
disk images and possibly serialized state of device models. I was going
to look into this now and was wondering whether a framework like this is
the right approach, particularly since it would exist next to XenD, which
I believe is handling live migration ?
 To be a bit clearer on the idea
of the framework: It would consist of a deamon running on the target machine
whose different plug-ins know how to handle the migration of different
pieces of state information and know how to de-serialize them (which mere
'scp' would not do). Clients on the source machine would communicate with
that daemon and transfer the state. The clients would have to be triggered
by XenD after a partition is not scheduled anymore and be given the IP
address of the target machine. Afterwards there needs to be some synchronization
on resuming the scheduling on the target machine after all state has been
deserialized.
  The plugable deamon itself would
handle the communication sockets, a low-level protocol which the plugins
and clients would use, have support for timing and protocol time-outs and
provide threading. The plugins would have to do the rest of what's necessary
to communicate with the infrastructure and the higher-level protocol shared
with the clients. 
  Comments?

  Stefan
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