[Qemu-block] NBD structured reads vs. block size

[Eric Blake]

Rich Jones pointed me to questionable behavior in qemu's NBD server 
implementation today: qemu advertises a minimum block size of 512 to any 
client that promises to honor block sizes, but when serving up a raw 
file that is not aligned to a sector boundary, attempting to read that 
final portion of the file results in a structured read with two chunks, 
the first for the data up to the end of the actual file, and the second 
reporting a hole for the rest of the sector. If a client is promising to 
obey block sizes on its requests, it seems odd that the server is 
allowed to send a result that is not also aligned to block sizes.

Right now, the NBD spec says that when structured replies are in use, 
then for a structured read:

    The server MAY split the reply into any number of content chunks;
    each chunk MUST describe at least one byte, although to minimize
    overhead, the server SHOULD use chunks with lengths and offsets as
    an integer multiple of 512 bytes, where possible (the first and
    last chunk of an unaligned read being the most obvious places for
    an exception).

I'm wondering if we should tighten that to require that the server 
partition the reply chunks to be aligned to the advertised minimum block 
size (at which point, qemu should either advertise 1 instead of 512 as 
the minimum size when serving up an unaligned file, or else qemu should 
just send the final partial sector as a single data chunk rather than 
trying to report the last few bytes as a hole).

For comparison, on block status, we require:

   The server SHOULD use descriptor
    lengths that are an integer multiple of 512 bytes where possible
    (the first and last descriptor of an unaligned query being the
    most obvious places for an exception), and MUST use descriptor
    lengths that are an integer multiple of any advertised minimum
    block size.

And qemu as a client currently hangs up on any server that violates that 
requirement on block status (that is, when qemu as the server tries to 
send a block status that was not aligned to the advertised block size, 
qemu as the client flags it as an invalid server - which means qemu as 
server is currently broken).  So I'm thinking we should copy that 
requirement onto servers for reads as well.

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org