[libvirt] [Qemu-devel] Re: Libvirt debug API

Markus Armbruster armbru at redhat.com
Fri Apr 23 15:43:43 UTC 2010


Anthony Liguori <anthony at codemonkey.ws> writes:

> On 04/23/2010 07:48 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
>> On 04/22/2010 09:49 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>> real API. Say, adding a device libvirt doesn't know about or
>>>> stopping the VM
>>>> while libvirt thinks it's still running or anything like that.
>>>   Another problem is issuing Monitor commands that could confuse
>>> libvirt's
>>>
>>> We need to make libvirt and qemu smarter.
>>>
>>> We already face this problem today with multiple libvirt users.
>>> This is why sophisticated management mechanisms (like LDAP) have
>>> mechanisms to do transactions or at least a series of atomic
>>> operations.
>>
>> And people said qmp/json was overengineered...
>>
>> But seriously, transactions won't help anything.  qemu maintains
>> state, and when you have two updaters touching a shared variable not
>> excepting each other to, things break, no matter how much locking
>> there is.
>
> Let's consider some concrete examples.  I'm using libvirt and QMP and
> in QMP, I want to hot unplug a device.
>
> Today, I do this by listing the pci devices, and issuing a pci_del
> that takes a PCI address.  This is intrinsically racy though because
> in the worst case scenario, in between when I enumerate pci devices
> and do the pci_del in QMP, in libvirt, I've done a pci_del and then a
> pci_add within libvirt of a completely different device.
>
> There are a few ways to solve this, the simplest being that we give
> devices unique ids that are never reused and instead of pci_del taking
> a pci bus address, it takes a device id.  That would address this
> race.

For what it's worth, that's how device_del works, except the ID is
chosen by the user, who is free to reuse them.

Really tangential to this thread, but it's worth repeating anyway: use
device_add & friends, not pci_add & friends.

[...]




More information about the libvir-list mailing list