Abstract
Cloud computing service providers use live migration to transparently move guests from one host to another. During live migration, guest access to certain memory regions is temporarily restricted. Such access restrictions are possible with CPUs; however, PCIe devices, e.g., GPUs or other accelerators, typically do not provide the facility to restrict memory access even temporarily. Thus, at present, guests that use PCIe devices cannot be live-migrated without device-specific mechanisms. This disclosure describes techniques to perform live migration for guests with PCIe devices by using hardware transactional memory to perform an atomic transfer of a range of guest memory from a source host to a destination host. PCIe-originated traffic targeted at a memory page under transition between hosts is not paused.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Serebrin, Benjamin; Makarevich, Grigory; and Northup, Eric, "Live migration of cloud clients that have PCIe devices", Technical Disclosure Commons, (August 07, 2019)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/2384