Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH 4/7] vmdk: Reject invalid compressed writes

[John Snow]

On 7/25/19 11:57 AM, Max Reitz wrote:
> Compressed writes generally have to write full clusters, not just in
> theory but also in practice when it comes to vmdk's streamOptimized
> subformat.  It currently is just silently broken for writes with
> non-zero in-cluster offsets:
> 
> $ qemu-img create -f vmdk -o subformat=streamOptimized foo.vmdk 1M
> $ qemu-io -c 'write 4k 4k' -c 'read 4k 4k' foo.vmdk
> wrote 4096/4096 bytes at offset 4096
> 4 KiB, 1 ops; 00.01 sec (443.724 KiB/sec and 110.9309 ops/sec)
> read failed: Invalid argument
> 
> (The technical reason is that vmdk_write_extent() just writes the
> incomplete compressed data actually to offset 4k.  When reading the
> data, vmdk_read_extent() looks at offset 0 and finds the compressed data
> size to be 0, because that is what it reads from there.  This yields an
> error.)
> 
> For incomplete writes with zero in-cluster offsets, the error path when
> reading the rest of the cluster is a bit different, but the result is
> the same:
> 
> $ qemu-img create -f vmdk -o subformat=streamOptimized foo.vmdk 1M
> $ qemu-io -c 'write 0k 4k' -c 'read 4k 4k' foo.vmdk
> wrote 4096/4096 bytes at offset 0
> 4 KiB, 1 ops; 00.01 sec (362.641 KiB/sec and 90.6603 ops/sec)
> read failed: Invalid argument
> 
> (Here, vmdk_read_extent() finds the data and then sees that the
> uncompressed data is short.)
> 
> It is better to reject invalid writes than to make the user believe they
> might have succeeded and then fail when trying to read it back.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <address@hidden>
> ---
>  block/vmdk.c | 10 ++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/block/vmdk.c b/block/vmdk.c
> index db6acfc31e..641acacfe0 100644
> --- a/block/vmdk.c
> +++ b/block/vmdk.c
> @@ -1731,6 +1731,16 @@ static int vmdk_write_extent(VmdkExtent *extent, 
> int64_t cluster_offset,
>      if (extent->compressed) {
>          void *compressed_data;
>  
> +        /* Only whole clusters */
> +        if (offset_in_cluster ||
> +            n_bytes > (extent->cluster_sectors * SECTOR_SIZE) ||
> +            (n_bytes < (extent->cluster_sectors * SECTOR_SIZE) &&
> +             offset + n_bytes != extent->end_sector * SECTOR_SIZE))
> +        {
> +            ret = -EINVAL;
> +            goto out;
> +        }
> +
>          if (!extent->has_marker) {
>              ret = -EINVAL;
>              goto out;
> 

What does this look like from a guest's perspective? Is there something
that enforces the alignment in the graph for us?

Or is it the case that indeed guests (or users via qemu-io) can request
invalid writes and we will halt the VM in those cases (in preference to
corrupting the disk)?