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

[Fam Zheng]

On Tue, 06/18 08:32, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> 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.

It's impossible to know a remote protocol points to the same image with
local file path, that's not in QEMU's scope, but we have a good chance
to detect (strcmp with existing bs->filename) and error out Paolo's
A-B-A problem, don't we?

-- 
Fam