Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v1 1/1] block: Add numeric errno field to BLOCK_IO_ERROR events

[Jack Schwartz]

Hi Kevin.

On 2017-12-22 05:52, Kevin Wolf wrote:

Am 22.12.2017 um 01:11 hat Jack Schwartz geschrieben:

BLOCK_IO_ERROR events currently contain a "reason" string which is
strerror(errno) of the error.  This enhancement provides those events with
the numeric errno value as well, since it is easier to parse for error type
than a string.

Signed-off-by: Jack Schwartz <address@hidden>
Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <address@hidden>
Reviewed-by: Karl Heubaum <address@hidden>

Apart from the technical details that Eric mentioed, I wonder what is
your use case for this?

We have thousands of servers in our cloud, and would like to closely monitor for different kinds of disk errors without parsing the non-machine-readable error string.

Exposing errors in a machine readable form was discussed earlier,

OK, found it.  April of 2010.

Upshot of discussion: exposing naked errnos are platform dependent.

 and
the result was that nobody had an actual use for error codes other than
presenting the right error message to the user - which the error string
already achieves.

Given the platform independence requirement, exposing errors to clients is not that simple given that different OSs use different errno values.  Other options/considerations than exposing naked errno values:

- Having a platform-independent enumeration of errors, as Eric suggested.  This would have to explicitly set an enumerated value for each individual errno we are interested in.  It would be returned in a field that ~parallels the "reason" string.  This should be OK since for BLOCK_IO_ERROR events we could limit values to just storage device errors plus a default "other"; otherwise this could be hard to maintain.

- The strerror strings cannot be used because they can change with locale. (This also assumes the strings are identical for given errnos cross-platform, and that there are no typos - which are not automatically checked-for.)

    Thanks,
    Jack

P.S.  Please excuse the delayed reply due to vacation / company shutdown.

The only exception so far was ENOSPC, which some management tools like
oVirt respond to by increasing the volume size, so this was mapped into
a bool.

Kevin