Re: [PATCH v4 for-6.0? 0/3] qcow2: fix parallel rewrite and discard (rw-lock)

[Max Reitz]

On 30.03.21 12:51, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
> 30.03.2021 12:49, Max Reitz wrote:
> > On 25.03.21 20:12, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
> > > ping. Do we want it for 6.0?
> >
> > I’d rather wait.  I think the conclusion was that guests shouldn’t hit 
> > this because they serialize discards?
>
> I think, that we never had bugs, so we of course can wait.
>
> > There’s also something Kevin wrote on IRC a couple of weeks ago, for 
> > which I had hoped he’d sent an email but I don’t think he did, so I’ll 
> > try to remember and paraphrase as well as I can...
> >
> > He basically asked whether it wouldn’t be conceptually simpler to take 
> > a reference to some cluster in get_cluster_offset() and later release 
> > it with a to-be-added put_cluster_offset().
> >
> > He also noted that reading is problematic, too, because if you read a 
> > discarded and reused cluster, this might result in an information leak 
> > (some guest application might be able to read data it isn’t allowed to 
> > read); that’s why making get_cluster_offset() the point of locking 
> > clusters against discarding would be better.
>
> Yes, I thought about read too, (RFCed in cover letter of [PATCH v5 0/6] 
> qcow2: fix parallel rewrite and discard (lockless))
>
> > This would probably work with both of your solutions.  For the 
> > in-memory solutions, you’d take a refcount to an actual cluster; in 
> > the CoRwLock solution, you’d take that lock.
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> Hmm. What do you mean? Just rename my qcow2_inflight_writes_inc() and 
> qcow2_inflight_writes_dec() to 
> get_cluster_offset()/put_cluster_offset(), to make it more native to use 
> for read operations as well?

Hm.  Our discussion wasn’t so detailed.

I interpreted it to mean all qcow2 functions that find an offset to a 
qcow2 cluster, namely qcow2_get_host_offset(), 
qcow2_alloc_host_offset(), and qcow2_alloc_compressed_cluster_offset().

When those functions return an offset (in)to some cluster, that cluster 
(or the image as a whole) should be locked against discards.  Every 
offset received this way would require an accompanying 
qcow2_put_host_offset().

> Or to update any kind of "getting cluster offset" in the whole qcow2 
> driver to take a kind of "dynamic reference count" by 
> get_cluster_offset() and then call corresponding put() somewhere? In 
> this case I'm afraid it's a lot more work..

Hm, really?  I would have assumed we need to do some locking in all 
functions that get a cluster offset this way, so it should be less work 
to take the lock in the functions they invoke to get the offset.

> It would be also the problem 
> that a lot of paths in qcow2 are not in coroutine and don't even take 
> s->lock when they actually should.

I’m not sure what you mean here, because all functions that invoke any 
of the three functions I listed above are coroutine_fns (or, well, I 
didn’t look it up, but they all have *_co_* in their name).

> This will also mean that we do same 
> job as normal qcow2 refcounts already do: no sense in keeping additional 
> "dynamic refcount" for L2 table cluster while reading it, as we already 
> have non-zero qcow2 normal refcount for it..

I’m afraid I don’t understand how normal refcounts relate to this.  For 
example, qcow2_get_host_offset() doesn’t touch refcounts at all.

Max