[Rust-VMM] [Rust-vmm] Goals for this list

Allison Randal allison at lohutok.net
Tue Dec 18 20:10:35 UTC 2018


On 12/18/18 2:02 PM, Dylan Reid wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 3:31 PM Liguori, Anthony <aliguori at amazon.com> wrote:
>>
>> 1) KVM bindgen bindings.  Right now, there is an issue with bindgen misgenerating code when encountering empty trailing arrays which are used in KVM.  Both crosvm and Firecracker get around this by modifying the headers by hand and then committing the results of bindgen.  Dylan also mentioned that they were unhappy about bindgen performance but this seems like an eventual optimization to me.
> 
> My concerns are only around build time. That's certainly something
> that can be optimized later and isn't specific to this use of bindgen.
> 
> It would be great to improve the current, manual bindgen process. It
> will make using new KVM features easier.

My experience with bindgen specifically for KVM, was that the result was
a horrible mess, because linux/kvm.h and ioctl.h made such extensive use
of #defines embedded within #defines, which bindgen translates into very
poor Rust macros. (Rust macros are great, far more powerful and
expressive than C # defines, but the Rust macros that bindgen generates
automatically from C #defines are poor.)

I experimented with simply defining the consts[1] and structs[2] in
Rust, instead of using bindgen for translation, and found that a
reasonable, modern interface to KVM actually only needs a small subset
of ioctl.h and linux/kvm.h, and that Rust definitions of all the consts
and structs are cleaner, more maintainable, and easier to review for
security than the pile of garbage generated by bindgen. Also, the KVM
ioctl interface is in more of a stable maintenance phase of development,
rather than rapid evolution, so it really isn't much effort to maintain
the Rust consts and structs in parallel to the C header files.

In general, I think bindgen is great, but it's not a good fit for KVM
specifically. There is a chance that bindgen could be modified to
produce more sane Rust consts from C #defines, but at the moment, a
human translator can do far better work than bindgen, and it's faster
and more reliable to just do the hand-translation than it is to attempt
to modify bindgen to do extensive compile-time optimizations on macros.

I thought about finishing up the Rust consts and structs, and offering
to contribute them to the KVM project. I could still do that if it would
be useful to anyone. My own work has moved beyond a focus on Rust
hypervisors, but I'm actively interested in seeing them move forward, so
I'm happy to help where I can.

Allison

[1] https://gitlab.com/preon/libkvm/blob/master/src/linux/kvm_consts.rs
(not complete, just a proof-of-concept)

[2] https://gitlab.com/preon/libkvm/blob/master/src/linux/kvm_structs.rs
(not complete, just a proof-of-concept)



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