Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] block: add 'backing' option to drive_add

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 18.06.2013 um 05:58 hat Fam Zheng geschrieben:
> On Mon, 06/17 17:12, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> > Am 17.06.2013 um 16:46 hat Paolo Bonzini geschrieben:
> > > Il 17/06/2013 16:26, Kevin Wolf ha scritto:
> > > > Am 17.06.2013 um 16:01 hat Paolo Bonzini geschrieben:
> > > >> Il 17/06/2013 15:52, Kevin Wolf ha scritto:
> > > >>> It's not a new thought that we need to change the block layer so that 
> > > >>> a
> > > >>> BlockDriverState can't be "empty", but that one BlockDriverState 
> > > >>> always
> > > >>> refers to one image. If you change media, you attach a different
> > > >>> BlockDriverState to the device. Once you have this, you can start
> > > >>> refcounting BlockDriverStates, so that the backing file remains usable
> > > >>> while the guest device already uses a different image.
> > > >>>
> > > >>> Not that it's it easy to get there...
> > > >>
> > > >> I'm not sure that is safe to do.
> > > >>
> > > >> Consider the case where the guest switches from A to B during backup,
> > > >> and then from B to A.  You get two BDS for the same file, which pretty
> > > >> much means havoc.
> > > > 
> > > > Well, yes, it means that the management tool needs to know what it's
> > > > doing. It shouldn't create a second BDS for A, but reattach the still
> > > > existing one.
> > > 
> > > How?  That would require the management tool to know the full chain of
> > > BDSes that were opened in the past.
> > 
> > They better know on which files they are operating. It's not like the
> > management could be unaware of running backup jobs or things like that.
> > 
> 
> Is there any case that QEMU needs to have two BDS pointing to the same
> file?

No, I think there's no case where this would make sense.

> If not, can we try to detect such case  on opening and try to
> reuse the bs?

We can't do it reliably, think about symlinks or even hard links, or
things like /dev/fdset/..., let alone remote protocols that refer to the
same image file etc.

We can check the obvious cases and error out for them, but that's about
what we can do. I don't think we should try to fix things automagically
when we can't do it right.

Kevin