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Device Hotplugging [Developer Preview]

Warning

This feature is currently in Developer Preview. It may have limitations, and its API or behavior may change in future releases.

Device hotplugging allows attaching and detaching PCI virtio devices to a running microVM without requiring a reboot. Supported device types are:

  • virtio-block
  • virtio-pmem
  • virtio-net

Prerequisites

  • PCI transport enabled: Firecracker must be started with the --enable-pci flag. Device hotplugging is not supported with MMIO transport.
  • Guest kernel with PCI support: The guest kernel must have PCI and the relevant virtio drivers enabled. See the kernel policy documentation for details.

Limitations

  • No automatic guest notification: Firecracker does not currently deliver a hotplug notification to the guest. After hotplugging a device, the guest must manually rescan the PCI bus to discover it. Similarly, before unplugging, the guest must manually remove the device.

Hotplugging a device

Hotplugging uses the same API endpoints used for pre-boot device configuration. The only difference is that the request is issued after the VM has started.

socket_location=/run/firecracker.socket

curl --unix-socket $socket_location -i \
    -X PUT 'http://localhost/drives/block1' \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{
        "drive_id": "block1",
        "path_on_host": "/path/to/block.ext4",
        "is_root_device": false,
        "is_read_only": false
    }'

Discovering the device in the guest

Since no hotplug notification is delivered to the guest, a PCI bus rescan is required to make the guest discover the new device:

echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan

After the rescan, the device will appear in lspci and the corresponding device node (e.g. /dev/vdb, /dev/pmem1) will be created by the guest kernel.

Hot-unplugging a device

Hot-unplugging is a two-step process: first the guest must release the device, then the host issues the unplug request.

Step 1: Remove the device from the guest

Before issuing the unplug API call, the guest must gracefully release the device. For example, unmount any mounted filesystems and remove the PCI device:

# Unmount the filesystem (if applicable)
umount /mnt/block1

# Remove the device from the guest
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:01.0/remove

Replace 0000:00:01.0 with the actual PCI BDF (Bus:Device.Function) address of the device, which can be found via lspci.

Step 2: Unplug from the host

Issue a DELETE request to the corresponding device endpoint:

curl --unix-socket $socket_location -i \
    -X DELETE 'http://localhost/drives/block1'