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From: | Eric Blake |
Subject: | Re: bitmaps -- copying allocation status into dirty bitmaps |
Date: | Fri, 1 Nov 2019 17:10:56 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.1.1 |
On 11/1/19 4:49 PM, Denis V. Lunev wrote:
On 11/1/19 4:42 PM, John Snow wrote:Hi, in one of my infamously unreadable and long status emails, I mentioned possibly wanting to copy allocation data into bitmaps as a way to enable users to create (external) snapshots from outside of the libvirt/qemu context. (That is: to repair checkpoints in libvirt after a user extended the backing chain themselves, you want to restore bitmap information for that node. Conveniently, this information IS the allocation map, so we can do this.) It came up at KVM Forum that we probably do want this, because oVirt likes the idea of being able to manipulate these chains from outside of libvirt/qemu. Denis suggested that instead of a new command, we can create a special name -- maybe "#ALLOCATED" or something similar that can never be allocated as a user-defined bitmap name -- as a special source for the merge command. You'd issue a merge from "#ALLOCATED" to "myBitmap0" to copy the current allocation data into "myBitmap0", for instance.original problem was a little bit incorrect. After some thoughts I found that this is NOT enough. We should also add zeroed clusters to the bitmap to merge! They do cover some data clusters from the original image. Thus we should either provide "ALLOCATED" bitmap for other purposes, and we should supply "CHANGED" which contains allocated AND explicitly zeroed clusters.
I'm also wondering if 'nbd-server-add' should add support to expose a 'qemu:allocation:XXX' meta context, in addition to the existing 'qemu:dirty-bitmap:XXX' contexts (would it just be a 0/1 bit for what is allocated in block layer XXX, or would it be an integer depth 0,1,2,... based on how deep in the chain a cluster is allocated, or?)
It may also be interesting to have a way to have 'nbd-server-add' force EIO errors to reads from an area not covered by a bitmap (whether that be the dirty bitmap or the #ALLOCATED bitmap), rather than falling back to a read from the backing chain, to ensure that an NBD client using such a backup image cannot read any more data than what the bitmap says is available.
DenSome thoughts: - The only commands where this pseudo-bitmap makes sense is merge. enable/disable/remove/clear/add don't make sense here. - This pseudo bitmap might make sense for backup, but it's not needed; you can just merge into an empty/enabled bitmap and then use that. - Creating an allocation bitmap on-the-fly is probably not possible directly in the merge command, because the disk status calls might take too long... Hm, actually, I'm not sure how to solve that one. Merge would need to become a job (or an async QMP command?) or we'd need to keep an allocation bitmap object around and in-sync. I don't really want to do either, so maybe I'm missing an obvious/better solution. Also, with regards to introspection, if we do create a special reserved name like #ALLOCATED, we need to make sure that this is available and obvious via the QAPI schema.
If nothing else, the recent addition of introspectible QMP features should make this possible.
-- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3226 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
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