hostmem-file: add the 'pmem' option

When QEMU emulates vNVDIMM labels and migrates vNVDIMM devices, it
needs to know whether the backend storage is a real persistent memory,
in order to decide whether special operations should be performed to
ensure the data persistence.

This boolean option 'pmem' allows users to specify whether the backend
storage of memory-backend-file is a real persistent memory. If
'pmem=on', QEMU will set the flag RAM_PMEM in the RAM block of the
corresponding memory region. If 'pmem' is set while lack of libpmem
support, a error is generated.

Signed-off-by: Junyan He <junyan.he@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Haozhong Zhang <haozhong.zhang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Igor Mammedov <imammedo@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/qemu-options.hx b/qemu-options.hx
index b1bf0f4..9b920f2 100644
--- a/qemu-options.hx
+++ b/qemu-options.hx
@@ -4070,6 +4070,13 @@ requires an alignment different than the default one used by QEMU, eg
 the device DAX /dev/dax0.0 requires 2M alignment rather than 4K. In
 such cases, users can specify the required alignment via this option.
 
+The @option{pmem} option specifies whether the backing file specified
+by @option{mem-path} is in host persistent memory that can be accessed
+using the SNIA NVM programming model (e.g. Intel NVDIMM).
+If @option{pmem} is set to 'on', QEMU will take necessary operations to
+guarantee the persistence of its own writes to @option{mem-path}
+(e.g. in vNVDIMM label emulation and live migration).
+
 @item -object memory-backend-ram,id=@var{id},merge=@var{on|off},dump=@var{on|off},share=@var{on|off},prealloc=@var{on|off},size=@var{size},host-nodes=@var{host-nodes},policy=@var{default|preferred|bind|interleave}
 
 Creates a memory backend object, which can be used to back the guest RAM.