This new API provides a file descriptor for every VM and VCPU to read
KVM statistics data in binary format.
It is meant to provide a lightweight, flexible, scalable and efficient
lock-free solution for user space telemetry applications to pull the
statistics data periodically for large scale systems. The pulling
frequency could be as high as a few times per second.
The statistics descriptors are defined by KVM in kernel and can be
by userspace to discover VM/VCPU statistics during the one-time setup
stage.
The statistics data itself could be read out by userspace telemetry
periodically without any extra parsing or setup effort.
There are a few existed interface protocols and definitions, but no
one can fulfil all the requirements this interface implemented as
below:
1. During high frequency periodic stats reading, there should be no
   extra efforts except the stats data read itself.
2. Support stats annotation, like type (cumulative, instantaneous,
   peak, histogram, etc) and unit (counter, time, size, cycles, etc).
3. The stats data reading should be free of lock/synchronization. We
   don't care about the consistency between all the stats data. All
   stats data can not be read out at exactly the same time. We really
   care about the change or trend of the stats data. The lock-free
   solution is not just for efficiency and scalability, also for the
   stats data accuracy and usability. For example, in the situation
   that all the stats data readings are protected by a global lock,
   if one VCPU died somehow with that lock held, then all stats data
   reading would be blocked, then we have no way from stats data that
   which VCPU has died.
4. The stats data reading workload can be handed over to other
   unprivileged process.
Reviewed-by: David Matlack <dmatlack@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Ricardo Koller <ricarkol@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Krish Sadhukhan <krish.sadhukhan@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Fuad Tabba <tabba@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Jing Zhang <jingzhangos@google.com>
Message-Id: <20210618222709.1858088-6-jingzhangos@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>