Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Flush pending AIO on reboot and shutdown.

[Gleb Natapov]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:53:57AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Now that I think about it, I think your fixing the wrong problem.  The  
> issue isn't that the IO requests need to be completed, but that they  
> *will* complete which means that the IDE driver will receive a callback  
> for a request that it no longer knows about (because it was reset).  So  
Not exactly. IDE still knows about the request after reset (actually currently
IDE doesn't know about reset), but the IDE code is written in such a way that 
there can be only one outstanding request in progress. When guest issues
another request before previous request is completed global data is
modified and first request start to use wrong data and consequences are
unpredictable. It may be crash, image corruption, infinity recursion.
The fact that IDE code allows to issue another request wile IDE is still
busy is also a bug.

> what we really need to do is modify the IDE device such that when it is  
> reset, it cancels any pending requests.
>
> The fact that this reset happens as a consequence of a system reset is  
> really just a coincidence.
That will also solve the problem of cause, but what bother me is that we
consciously drop user data that we can easily save. Why? Real HW tries
hard to save every bit of user data and we just decided to drop it. The
difference between cancel or complete a request may be corrupted or not
corrupted file system after a crash.

I'll send updated patch.

--
                        Gleb.