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Re: [Qemu-devel] bug in reopen arch

From: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] bug in reopen arch
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 14:17:21 +0300

22.06.2018 11:56, Kevin Wolf wrote:
(Berto, I'm CCing you just because this is about reopen, so you might
have thoughts about it. But it's not really related to what you're
currently working on.)

Am 21.06.2018 um 19:44 hat Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy geschrieben:
21.06.2018 20:17, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 21.06.2018 um 17:55 hat Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy geschrieben:
21.06.2018 17:25, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 15.06.2018 um 20:42 hat Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy geschrieben:
Now, I've found the following workaround, what do you think about something
like this as a temporary fix:
I honestly don't understand why this workaround makes any difference.
with this patch, commit for children will be called earlier than for parent,
so, when reopening bitmaps rw (which is done in commit) bs->file will be
already completely reopened rw, and all works.
.bdrv_reopen_commit() can't do any I/O because it must not fail.
Therefore the order in which nodes are committed should not matter.

Any I/O that needs to be done has to be in .bdrv_reopen_prepare() (and
possibly be kept in a temporary buffer) and .bdrv_reopen_commit() can
only apply what is already in memory.

I don't see the code for reopening bitmaps in master. Is this a pending
it is in block.c, in bdrv_reopen_commit()

if (!old_can_write && new_can_write && drv->bdrv_reopen_bitmaps_rw) {
         Error *local_err = NULL;
         if (drv->bdrv_reopen_bitmaps_rw(bs, &local_err) < 0) {
This is already an ugly hack, we shouldn't have a separate callback for
reopening bitmaps. :-(

If done properly, this code would only exist internally in qcow2 as part
of the .bdrv_reopen/commit implementation.

I'm also not convinced of the error handling. According to commit
cb9ff6c25, this is mostly about the IN_USE flag. The qcow2 spec says
"The bitmap was not saved correctly and may be inconsistent." for this
flag. So the fail-safe state is IN_USE being set.

What I think qcow2 should be doing is setting IN_USE in .prepare (for ro
-> rw) and clearing it in .commit (for rw -> ro).

why this in prepare and this in commit? Not both in commit or both in prepare?

For this to be possible, .prepare needs write access to an image that
was read-only before and is becoming writable; and .commit needs write
access to an image that was writable and is becoming read-only.

This is the problem to solve, and implementing a proper design that can
provide this will solve the bug for you, too.

I'm not completely sure how this can be achieved best. Allowing parents
to choose whether they want to access the old or the new state is
probably not going to work in the general case because that's
essentially an image opened twice.

Even if it feels like a hack, too, maybe we need to make file-posix
already switch to the "better" file descriptor in .prepare and store the
old one in the BDRVRawReopenState so it can be restored in .abort.

The "better" file descriptor is the one that allows more operation, i.e.
writable is better than read-only in this sense. Of course, if we have
two options like read-only that can prevent certain operations, it may
be unclear, which of the two file descriptors is the one we want.

And obviously, this still needs child-to-parent .prepare order. I
believe when I tried reversing the current order a while ago, I ran into
problems, so whether this is possible or how it needs to be done in
detail needs to be checked carefully.


Best regards,

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