Re: [Qemu-block] Jobs 2.0 QAPI [RFC]

[John Snow]

On 12/21/2015 11:58 AM, Alberto Garcia wrote:
> On Thu 17 Dec 2015 01:50:08 AM CET, John Snow <address@hidden> wrote:
>> In working through a prototype to enable multiple block jobs. A few
>> problem spots in our API compatibility become apparent.
>>
>> In a nutshell, old Blockjobs rely on the "device" to identify the job,
>> which implies:
>>
>> 1) A job is always attached to a device / the root node of a device
>> 2) There can only be one job per device
>> 3) A job can only affect one device at a time
>> 4) Once created, a job will always be associated with that device.
>>
>> All four of these are wrong and something we need to change, so
>> principally the "device" addressing scheme for Jobs needs to go and we
>> need a new ID addressing scheme instead.
> 
> Out of curiosity, do you have specific examples of block jobs that are
> affected by these problems?
> 

The motivating problem is multiple block jobs. Multiple block jobs are
hard to implement in a generic way (instead of per-job) because the API
is not suited well for it.

We need to refer to jobs by ID instead of "device," but while we're at
it Jeff Cody is working on a more universal/fine-grained op blocker
permission system. (See his RFC discussion thread for more details.)

The two can be co-developed to form a new jobs API.

> For the intermediate block-stream functionality I was having problems
> because of 1), so I extended the 'device' parameter to identify
> arbitrary node names as well.
> 
> Just to make things clear: your proposal looks good to me, I'm only
> wondering whether you're simply looking for a cleaner API or you have a
> use case that you cannot fulfill because of the way block jobs work
> now...
> 

The cleaner interface is definitely the larger motivator.

> Thanks!
> 
> Berto
> 

However, better flexibility also plays a part. Say we have two devices:

[drive0]: [X] --> [Y] --> [Z]
[drive1]: [A] --> [B]

In theory, we should be able to commit Z into Y into X while we
simultaneously perform a backup from X to A. We definitely can't do that
now.

There may be some better use cases -- backups, fleecing and other
read-only operations in particular have a high likelihood of being able
to run concurrently with other operations.


We definitely *can* just extend the old API to allow for these kinds of
things, but since it represents a new paradigm of job manipulation, it's
easier to just extend the block jobs api into a new "jobs" API and allow
the system to expand to other subsystems.


Thanks,
--js