Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 04/14] qemu-nbd: Simplify --partition handling

[Eric Blake]

On 11/30/18 4:26 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 04:03:33PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> > Our open-coding of strtol handling forgot to handle overflow
> > conditions. What's more, since we insiste on a user-supplied
>
> "insist"

(Ever wonder if I stick in a typo on purpose, just to see who reviews 
closely?)

> > partition to be non-zero, we can use 0 rather than -1 for our
> > initial value to distinguish when a partition is not being
> > served, for slightly more optimal code.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
> > ---
> >   qemu-nbd.c | 14 +++++---------
> >   1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

> > +            if (qemu_strtoi(optarg, NULL, 0, &partition) < 0 ||
> > +                partition < 1 || partition > 8) {
> > +                error_report("Invalid partition %s", optarg);
>
> Pffft only supporting a mere 8 partitions :-?  I raised the limits in
> nbdkit recently so it can handle an infinite number of partitions :-)

nbdkit also handles GPT partitions. qemu-nbd is still stuck on MBR:

static int find_partition(BlockBackend *blk, int partition,
                          off_t *offset, off_t *size)
{
    struct partition_record mbr[4];
    uint8_t data[MBR_SIZE];

and if I read git blame correctly, the partition code in qemu-nbd is 
mostly untouched since Fabrice committed Anthony's initial 
implementation in 2008.

Also, reading the code, I see that qemu-nbd allows partitions 5-8 
because it reads through the extended partition descriptor in 4 to 
expose the logical partitions within; which nbdkit can't do yet :)

> Anyway, it's a problem with the existing code, so doesn't affect the
> review.

Indeed, and with nbdkit around, I'm wondering if I should deprecate 
'qemu-nbd --partition' and just point people to nbdkit instead 
(provided, of course, that nbdkit learns logical partitions).

Even if you have a qcow2 image with MBR partitions, and where we don't 
want to write a qcow2 plugin in nbdkit, you can still always rewrite:

client -> qemu-nbd --partition=1

into

client -> nbdkit --filter=partition nbd partition=1 -> qemu-nbd

(although I don't know what the performance penalty would be)

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