Re: [PATCH 1/4] qdev: add DEVICE_RUNTIME_ERROR event

[Roman Kagan]

On Mon, May 30, 2022 at 01:28:17PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Roman Kagan <rvkagan@yandex-team.ru> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 12:54:47PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> >> Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@yandex-team.ru> writes:
> >> 
> >> > This event represents device runtime errors to give time and
> >> > reason why device is broken.
> >> 
> >> Can you give an or more examples of the "device runtime errors" you have
> >> in mind?
> >
> > Initially we wanted to address a situation when a vhost device
> > discovered an inconsistency during virtqueue processing and silently
> > stopped the virtqueue.  This resulted in device stall (partial for
> > multiqueue devices) and we were the last to notice that.
> >
> > The solution appeared to be to employ errfd and, upon receiving a
> > notification through it, to emit a QMP event which is actionable in the
> > management layer or further up the stack.
> >
> > Then we observed that virtio (non-vhost) devices suffer from the same
> > issue: they only log the error but don't signal it to the management
> > layer.  The case was very similar so we thought it would make sense to
> > share the infrastructure and the QMP event between virtio and vhost.
> >
> > Then Konstantin went a bit further and generalized the concept into
> > generic "device runtime error".  I'm personally not completely convinced
> > this generalization is appropriate here; we'd appreciate the opinions
> > from the community on the matter.
> 
> "Device emulation sending an even on entering certain error states, so
> that a management application can do something about it" feels
> reasonable enough to me as a general concept.
> 
> The key point is of course "can do something": the event needs to be
> actionable.  Can you describe possible actions for the cases you
> implement?

The first one that we had in mind was informational, like triggering an
alert in the monitoring system and/or painting the VM as malfunctioning
in the owner's UI.

There can be more advanced scenarios like autorecovery by resetting the
faulty VM, or fencing it if it's a cluster member.

Thanks,
Roman.