On Mon, 05/15 13:58, Peter Lieven wrote:
Am 15.05.2017 um 13:53 schrieb Fam Zheng:
On Mon, 05/15 13:26, Peter Lieven wrote:
Am 15.05.2017 um 12:50 schrieb Fam Zheng:
On Mon, 05/15 12:02, Peter Lieven wrote:
Hi Block developers,
I would like to add a feature to Qemu to drain all traffic from a block so that
I can take external snaphosts without the risk to that in the middle of a write
operation. Its meant for cases where where QGA freeze/thaw is not available.
For me its enough to have this through qemu-io, but Kevin asked me to check
if its not worth to have a stable API for it and present it via QMP/HMP.
What are your thoughts?
For debugging purpose or a "hacky" usage where you know what you are doing, it
may be fine to have this. The only issue is it should be a separate flag, like
BlockJob.user_paused.
How can I add, remove such a flag?
Like bs->user_drained. Set it in "drain" command, then increment
bs->quiesce_counter if toggled; vise versa.
Ah okay. You wouldn't use bdrv_drained_begin/end? Because in these functions
the counter is incremented already.
You're right, calling bdrv_drained_begin() is better.
What happens from guest perspective? In the case of virtio, the request queue is
not handled and -ETIMEDOUT may happen. With IDE, I/O commands are still handled,
the command is not effective (or rather the implementation is not complete).
That it only works with virtio is fine. However, the thing it does not work
correctly
apply then also to all other users of the drained_begin/end functions, right?
As for the timeout I only plan to drain the device for about 1 second.
It didn't matter because for IDE, the invariant (staying quiesced as long as
necessary) is already ensured by BQL. Virtio is different because it supports
ioeventfd and data plane.
Okay understood. So my use of bdrv_drained_begin/end is more an abuse of
these functions?
Sort of. But it's not unreasonable to "extend" bdrv_drained_begin/end to cover
IDE, I just haven't thought about "how".
Do you have another idea how to achieve what I want? I was thinking of throttle
the I/O to zero. It would be enough to do this for writes, reading doesn't hurt
in
my case.
Maybe add a block filter on top of the drained node, drain it when doing so,
then queue all further requests with a CoQueue until "undrain". (It is then not
quite to "drain" but to "halt" or "pause", though.)