Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] [RFC, v1] Namespace Management Support

[Klaus Birkelund]

On Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 03:52:29PM -0700, Matt Fitzpatrick wrote:
> Hey Klaus,
> 
> Sorry for the late reply!  I finally found this message amid the pile of
> emails Qemu dumped on me.
> 
> I don't know what the right answer is here... NVMe is designed in a way
> where you *do* "carve up" the flash into logical groupings and the nvme
> firmware decides on how that's done. Those logical groupings can be attached
> to different controllers(which we don't have here yet?) after init, but
> that's a problem for future us I guess?But that's all stuff you already
> know.
> 

Yeah, I havn't started worrying about that ;)

> The "nvme-nvm" solution might be the right approach, but I'm a bit hesitant
> on the idea of growing tnvmcap...
> 
> I can't think of any way to create namespaces on the fly and not have it use
> some single existing block backend, unless we defined a range of block
> images on qemu start and namespace create/attach only uses one image up to
> and including it's max size per namespace? That might work, and I think
> that's what you suggested (or at least is similar to), though it could be
> pretty wasteful. It wouldn't offer a "true" namespace management support,
> but could be close enough.
> 

Having an emulated device that supports namespace management would be
very useful for testing software, but yeah, I have a hard time seeing
how we can make that fit with the current "QEMU model".

> I'm in the middle of going through the patch you posted. Nice job!  I'm glad
> to see more people adding enhancements. It was pretty stale for years.
> 

Thanks for looking at it, I know it's a lot to go through ;)

> -Matt
> On 7/5/19 12:50 AM, Klaus Birkelund wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 10:39:36AM -0700, Matt Fitzpatrick wrote:
> > > Adding namespace management support to the nvme device. Namespace creation
> > > requires contiguous block space for a simple method of allocation.
> > > 
> > > I wrote this a few years ago based on Keith's fork and nvmeqemu fork and
> > > have recently re-synced with the latest trunk.  Some data structures in
> > > nvme.h are a bit more filled out that strictly necessary as this is also 
> > > the
> > > base for sr-iov and IOD patched to be submitted later.
> > > 
> > Hi Matt,
> > 
> > Nice! I'm always happy when new features for the nvme device is posted!
> > 
> > I'll be happy to review it, but I won't start going through it in
> > details because I believe the approach to supporting multiple namespaces
> > is flawed. We had a recent discussion on this and I also got some
> > unrelated patches rejected due to implementing it similarly by carving
> > up the image.
> > 
> > I have posted a long series that includes a patch for multiple
> > namespaces. It is implemented by introducing a fresh `nvme-ns` device
> > model that represents a namespace and attaches to a bus created by the
> > parent `nvme` controller device.
> > 
> > The core issue is that a qemu image /should/ be attachable to other
> > devices (say ide) and not strictly tied to the one device model. Thus,
> > we cannot just shove a bunch of namespaces into a single image.
> > 
> > But, in light of your patch, I'm not convinced that my implementation is
> > the correct solution. Maybe the abstraction should not be an `nvme-ns`
> > device, but a `nvme-nvm` device that when attached changes TNVMCAP and
> > UNVMCAP? Maybe you have some input for this? Or we could have both and
> > dynamically create the nvme-ns devices on top of nvme-nvm devices. I
> > think it would still require a 1-to-1 mapping, but it could be a way to
> > support the namespace management capability.
> > 
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Klaus
> > 
> 

Hi Kevin,

This highlights another situation where the "1 image to 1 block device"
model doesn't fit that well with NVMe. Especially with the introduction
of "NVM Sets" in NVMe 1.4. It would be very nice to introduce a
'nvme-nvmset' device model that adds an NVM Set which the controller can
then create namespaces in.

Is it completely unacceptable for a device to use the image in such a
way that it would not make sense (aka present the same block device)
when attached to another device (ide, ...)?

I really have a hard time seeing how we could support these features
without violating the '1 image to 1 block device" model.


Cheers,
Klaus