Re: [Xen-devel] libxenlight or libxenheavy?

[Vincent Hanquez <vincent.hanquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 07:08:47PM +0000, Andres Lagar-Cavilla wrote:
> Aside of the tongue in cheek title, I'd like to get a feel for where is 
> libxenlight going. I love having a library that gives me three 
> straight-forward C calls to create a domain, and I think it's an 
> excellent vehicle to writing control stacks.
> 
> But some of the latest patches have grown/bloated the library in 
> directions I don't think are useful. This an obviously subjective take 
> on the matter, but here are two examples:

I agree with your observation. the goal for libxenlight is not to provide
a full hand on solutions, but a bunch of helper functions to do one thing
and only one thing "plug a disk", "suspend a domain".
 
I think however that whilst it's not going only in the right direction,
the early stage of the library means that we need for testing a lot
of things that shouldn't be in the API.

once we reach a stage where everything works, i'm sure that integrating
into proper management stack will means that the API will simplify as
things become obsolete or useless.

> - Managing tapdisk2 devices in libxenlight: why at all? An upper-level 
> control stack can (will have to) vet the configuration stanza of the 
> tapdisk2 process, and it can then launch it and manage its life-cycle 
> (i.e. echo appropriate commands to the sysfs interface). One of the 
> great advantages of tapdisk2 is that it looks like a regular block 
> device: /dev/xen/blktap-2/tapdev0. Libxenlight doesn't need to know this 
> is any different from a regular block device ...

indeed.

> 
> - Asynchronous notifications via xenstore watches: I've seen at least 
> two locations (device deletion during destroy and waiting for domain 
> death) where a watch on a xenstore path is placed by the library, and 
> later xs_read_watch is called. According to my limited understanding, 
> this could read *any* firing watch placed by the same process, and the 
> code will discard it unless it's the one we are looking for. Thus 
> destroying information useful to someone else. I cannot have two 
> concurrent (or even interleaved) calls to libxenlight on these code 
> paths, because they could read each other's watches. Why not leave these 
> to an upper-level stack, which in all likelihood will have to deal with 
> lots of asynchronous events? As it stands, I have to write my code 
> *around* libxenlight, which kind of defeats the purpose.

This whole part is the mess, i wouldn't rely on the lib for now for thoses.
the opensource xs library need some cleanup in the watch processing department
in the first place.

-- 
Vincent

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