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Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [RFC] qapi: events in QMP


From: Anthony Liguori
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [RFC] qapi: events in QMP
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 06:03:13 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.15) Gecko/20101027 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.10

On 02/14/2011 03:50 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 13.02.2011 19:08, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
Hi,

In my QAPI branch[1], I've now got almost every existing QMP command
converted with (hopefully) all of the hard problems solved.  There is
only one remaining thing to attack before posting for inclusion and
that's events.  Here's my current thinking about what to do.
I've had a quick look at your branch and I have one general question: Is
there a specific reason why you duplicate existing monitor handlers
instead of converting the existing ones? Are the old ones still used?

It's just temporary. It makes it very easy to test code side-by-side. By the time I submit, I'll remove the old code.

Proposal for events in QAPI

For QAPI, I'd like to model events on the notion of signals and
slots[2].  A client would explicitly connect to a signal through a QMP
interface which would result in a slot being added that then generates
an event.  Internally in QEMU, we could also connect slots to the same
signals.  Since we don't have an object API in QMP, we'd use a pair of
connect/disconnect functions that had enough information to identify the
signal.

Example:

We would define QEVENT_BLOCK_IO_EVENT as:

# qmp-schema.json
{ 'BlockIOEvent': {'device': 'str', 'action': 'str', 'operation': 'str'} }

The 'Event' suffix is used to determine that the type is an event and
not a structure.  This would generate the following structures for QEMU:

typedef void (BlockIOEventFunc)(const char *device, const char *action,
const char *operation, void *opaque);
Why is an event not a structure? For one it makes things inconsistent
(you have this 'Event' suffix magic), and it's not even convenient. The
parameter list of the BlockIOEventFunc might become very long. At the
moment you have three const char* there and I think it's only going to
grow - who is supposed to remember the right order of arguments?

So why not make the event a struct and have a typedef void
(BlockIOEventFunc)(BlockIOEvent *evt)?

A signal is a function call. You can pass a structure as a parameter is you so desire but the natural thing to do is pass position arguments.

If you've got a ton of signal arguments, it's probably an indication that you're doing something wrong.

typedef struct BlockIOEvent {
      /* contents are private */
} BlockIOEvent;

/* Connect a slot to a BlockIOEvent signal and return a handle to the
connection */
int block_io_event_connect(BlockIOEvent *event, BlockIOEventFunc *cb,
void *opaque);

/* Signal any connect slots of a BlockIOEvent */
void block_io_event_signal(BlockIOEvent *event, const char *device,
const char *action, const char *operation);

/* Disconnect a slot from a signal based on a connection handle */
void block_io_event_disconnect(BlockIOEvent *event, int handle);

In the case of BlockIOEvent, this is a global signal that is not tied to
any specific object so there would be a global BlockIOEvent object
within QEMU.

  From a QMP perspective, we would have the following function in the schema:

[ 'block-io-event', {}, {}, 'BlockIOEvent' ]
Not sure what this list is supposed to tell me...

I see that you use the same for command, so I guess the first one is
something like an command/event name, the second seems to be the
arguments, last could be the type of the return value, the third no idea.'

Sorry, first is the name of the function, second is required arguments, third is optional arguments, last is return value.

So would an event look like a response to a command that was never issued?

From a protocol perspective, events look like this today:

{ "event": "BlockIOError", "data": { "device": "ide1-cd0", "operation": "read", "action": "report" } }

The only change to the protocol I'm proposing is adding a "tag" field which would give us:

{ "event": "BlockIOError", tag: "event023234", "data": { "device": "ide1-cd0", "operation": "read", "action": "report" } }

Another Example

Here's an example of BlockDeviceEvent, the successor to BlockIOEvent.
It makes use of signal accessor arguments and QAPI enumeration support:
So are we going to drop BlockIOEvent (or any other event that will be
extended) or will both old and new version continue to exist and we
always signal both of them?

Both have to exist. We can't drop old events without breaking backwards compatibility.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

Kevin





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