Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v5 10/11] dataplane: add virtio-blk data plane code

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 08:35:55AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 05/12/2012 21:47, Stefan Hajnoczi ha scritto:
> > +
> > +/* Block until pending requests have completed
> > + *
> > + * The vring continues to be serviced so ensure no new requests will be 
> > added
> > + * to avoid races.
> > + */
> > +void virtio_blk_data_plane_drain(VirtIOBlockDataPlane *s)
> > +{
> > +    qemu_mutex_lock(&s->num_reqs_lock);
> > +    while (s->num_reqs > 0) {
> > +        qemu_cond_wait(&s->no_reqs_cond, &s->num_reqs_lock);
> > +    }
> > +    qemu_mutex_unlock(&s->num_reqs_lock);
> > +}
> 
> Hi Stefan,
> 
> so this was not changed from v4?

BTW I should go into slightly more detail about why I stopped short of
implementing the notify+join approach.

notify+join means stopping the event loop and data plane thread so
that the caller is sure that virtio-blk-data-plane is quiesced.

Unfortunately this doesn't map nicely to bdrv_drain_all() where the
caller has the global mutex, quiesces I/O, and then performs a critical
operation.  I/O resumes after the caller returns or releases the global
mutex:

bdrv_drain_all();
critical_operation();
return;
/* now it's okay to process I/O again */

We cannot use notify+join here because bdrv_drain_all() would stop the
data plane thread but nothing restarts it!

Perhaps we'd need a "resume" call after the critical operation so that
the data plane thread is restarted - but this sounds invasive and is a
departure from how existing I/O and emulated devices work.

Stefan