Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 1/5] monitor: screen_dump async

[Alon Levy]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 01:45:16PM -0200, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:13:14 +0200
> Gerd Hoffmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > On 10/24/11 14:02, Alon Levy wrote:
> > > Make screen_dump monitor command an async command to allow next for qxl
> > > to implement it as a initiating call to red_worker and completion on
> > > callback, to fix a deadlock when issueing a screendump command via
> > > libvirt while connected with a libvirt controlled spice-gtk client.
> > 
> > Approach looks reasonable to me.  Patch breaks the build though, you've
> > missed a bunch of screen_dump functions in non-x86 targets.
> 
> There are two problems actually.
> 
> The first one is that changing an existing command from synchronous
> to asynchronous is an incompatible change because asynchronous commands
> semantics is different. For an example of possible problems please
> check: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623903.
> 
> The second problem is that the existing asynchronous interface in the
> monitor is incomplete and has never been used for real. Our plan is to
> use QAPI's async support, but that has not landed in master yet and iirc
> there wasn't consensus about it. I also think it's a bit late for its
> inclusion in 1.0 (and certainly not a candidate for stable).
> 
> If all you need here is to delay sending the response, then maybe the
> current interface could work (although I honestly don't trust it and
> regret not having dropped it). Otherwise our only choice would be to
> work on getting the QAPI async support merged.

My problem is that the io thread keeps the global mutex during the wait,
that's why the async monitor is perfect for what I want - this is
exactly what it does. I haven't looked at QAPI async support, but I
understand it's a bit in the future.