Re: [Xen-devel] blktap, qdisk, xl cd-eject, and xencommons

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/30/2013 03:12 PM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-04-30 at 13:27 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> > On 04/30/2013 11:21 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2013-04-30 at 11:02 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> > > > The second is problems with xl cd-insert and eject, initially reported
> > > > by Fabio Fantoni, and then (accidentally) reproduced by me.  The
> > > > problem turns out to be libxl using blktap for cdroms.  Basically,
> > > > AFAICT, the whole cd-insert cd-eject thing completely doen't work if
> > > > blktap is used to provide it; and it's not a simple fix.
> > > cd-insert/eject are suppose to operate on emulated CDROM, which blktap
> > > simply isn't in a position to provide, even if it was capable of doing
> > > so. So this is certainly wrong IMHO at some level.
> > >
> > > All emulated disks have a PV counterpart. Many (all?) PVHVM drivers
> > > choose not to unplug the emulated CDROM and use it in preference to the
> > > PV version (since this way they get proper media change events etc) but
> > > I don't think they are required to behave like this.
> > >
> > > In principal it's not wrong to provide the PV face of a device from a
> > > different backend to the emulated one (e.g. we do blkback+qdisk all the
> > > time for disks), but in the interests of simplicity it seems like the
> > > obvious thing to do is to unconditionally use qdisk for both faces of an
> > > HVM guest's CDROM.
> > Right -- so I guess from a release perspective the best thing to do
> > would just be to have tools/libxl/libxl_device.c:disk_try_backend() fail
> > for TAP if disk->is_cdrom is true?
> Without having consulted the code that Sounds Plausible, yes.
>
> Is the underling problem understood though? In principal PV=blktap
> +EMU=qemu should work, is this just some confusion on libxl's side when
> reading the xenstore entries? I we sure we can't trigger that confusion
> for other uses of blktap -- e.g. disks.
Well the whole thing is a bit of a tangled mess right now.

For one thing, disk_try_backend() will return an error if disk->format 
is EMPTY.  (Which is why in 4.2 if you hit this path, it breaks 
everything -- libxl__device_disk_set_backend() sets it to qdev because 
TAP fails, so it tries to write new qdev stuff and fails halfway through.)
Is there anyone who actually knows what's supposed to be going on here, 
that we can ask to help with this?
I suppose it might have been a mistake that TAP fails for EMPTY -- PHY 
will take EMPTY, so maybe TAP can too?
Thanos, do you have any idea about that?  It looks like for an empty 
cdrom, it just sets "params" equal to "" in xenstore 
(tools/libxl/libxl.c:libxl_cdrom_insert()) -- will that work for blktap, 
or cause a problem?
And, can changing the the "params" change the actual disk in the current 
version of blktap?
 -George

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