Re: [Qemu-devel] [Nbd] Is NBD_CMD_FLAG_FUA valid during NBD_CMD_FLUSH?

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 02:34:24PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 03/31/2016 02:17 PM, Alex Bligh wrote:
> >> even if we aren't quite sure
> >> what to document of those flags.  And that means qemu is correct, and
> >> the NBD protocol has a bug.  Since you contributed the FUA flag, is that
> >> something you can try to improve?
> > 
> > Yeah. My mess so I should clean it up. I think FUA should be valid
> > on essentially everything.
> > 
> > I think I might wait until structured replies is in though!
> 
> It's also tricky because we just barely documented that servers SHOULD
> reject invalid flags with EINVAL; and that clients MUST NOT send FUA on
> commands where it is not documented; I don't know if we have an adequate
> discovery system in place to learn _which_ commands support FUA,

That's what I'm mostly worried about. Yes, we have FUA, and yes, some
clients may send it on commands that aren't WRITE, but it is not very
well defined what happens then:

- Currently-released versions of nbd-server will accept the flag on
  non-WRITE commands, but ignore it. This is generally not desirable, I
  would say.
- The change that I made a few days ago means future versions will *not*
  accept it. I feel this is better than accepting-and-ignoring, but not
  ideal either in case a client sends out a request that includes FUA.

We can perhaps ignore the former of the above as "buggy behaviour" and
not negotiate anything for a server that does the "proper" thing of
accepting-and-acting-on for non-WRITE FUA, but then it is probably a
good idea to document in the spec that "there are older, buggy, servers
which accept but ignore FUA on anything but WRITE", at least for a few
years until such older servers aren't available anymore.

Alternatively, we could add yet another flag bit to signal "FUA valid
everywhere". Not sure if that is worth it.

[...]

-- 
< ron> I mean, the main *practical* problem with C++, is there's like a dozen
       people in the world who think they really understand all of its rules,
       and pretty much all of them are just lying to themselves too.
 -- #debian-devel, OFTC, 2016-02-12