When processing vectored guest requests that are not aligned to the
storage request alignment, we pad them by adding head and/or tail
buffers for a read-modify-write cycle.
The guest can submit I/O vectors up to IOV_MAX (1024) in length, but
with this padding, the vector can exceed that limit. As of
4c002cef0e9abe7135d7916c51abce47f7fc1ee2 ("util/iov: make
qemu_iovec_init_extended() honest"), we refuse to pad vectors beyond the
limit, instead returning an error to the guest.
To the guest, this appears as a random I/O error. We should not return
an I/O error to the guest when it issued a perfectly valid request.
Before 4c002cef0e9abe7135d7916c51abce47f7fc1ee2, we just made the vector
longer than IOV_MAX, which generally seems to work (because the guest
assumes a smaller alignment than we really have, file-posix's
raw_co_prw() will generally see bdrv_qiov_is_aligned() return false, and
so emulate the request, so that the IOV_MAX does not matter). However,
that does not seem exactly great.
I see two ways to fix this problem:
1. We split such long requests into two requests.
2. We join some elements of the vector into new buffers to make it
shorter.
I am wary of (1), because it seems like it may have unintended side
effects.
(2) on the other hand seems relatively simple to implement, with
hopefully few side effects, so this patch does that.
To do this, the use of qemu_iovec_init_extended() in bdrv_pad_request()
is effectively replaced by the new function bdrv_create_padded_qiov(),
which not only wraps the request IOV with padding head/tail, but also
ensures that the resulting vector will not have more than IOV_MAX
elements. Putting that functionality into qemu_iovec_init_extended() is
infeasible because it requires allocating a bounce buffer; doing so
would require many more parameters (buffer alignment, how to initialize
the buffer, and out parameters like the buffer, its length, and the
original elements), which is not reasonable.
Conversely, it is not difficult to move qemu_iovec_init_extended()'s
functionality into bdrv_create_padded_qiov() by using public
qemu_iovec_* functions, so that is what this patch does.
Because bdrv_pad_request() was the only "serious" user of
qemu_iovec_init_extended(), the next patch will remove the latter
function, so the functionality is not implemented twice.
Buglink:https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2141964
Signed-off-by: Hanna Czenczek<hreitz@redhat.com>