Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 00/27] block: Lock images when opening

[Fam Zheng]

On Wed, 05/11 13:56, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 11.05.2016 um 13:48 hat Richard W.M. Jones geschrieben:
> > While I remember there is another concern that doesn't seem to be
> > addressed in this patch series.  What happens when a guest is paused?
> > I think exclusive locks should be converted to shared locks in that
> > case, since (only while the guest is paused) it _is_ safe to fish
> > around inside the guest's state.  Of course the lock must be restored
> > before the guest resumes.
> 
> I think it's still one of the cases where it's appropriate to require an
> "I know what I'm doing" flag. In paused guests, you still don't
> necessarily see the same contents as the guest does (because of guest
> caches). Apart from that, things like block jobs and NBD servers keep
> running even with a stopped VM.

Agreed. The external accessor can explicitly specify "lock-image=off" on its
command line to fish around.

Fam

> 
> The lock can only be dropped in cases where we can justify switching to
> BDRV_O_INACTIVE, and I don't think a simple stop/cont should do this.
> 
> Kevin