[libvirt] [PATCH v2 2/2] virsh: Enhance the detailed output of domblklist for networked source

[John Ferlan]

On 09/04/2015 04:26 AM, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 03.09.2015 22:47, John Ferlan wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 09/02/2015 11:58 AM, Michal Privoznik wrote:
>>> From: Lin Ma <lma at suse.com>
>>>
>>> Format & output more detailed information about networked source
>>>
>>> e.g: The output without the patch:
>>> $ virsh domblklist $DOMAIN --details
>>> Type       Device     Target     Source
>>> ------------------------------------------------
>>> network    disk       vda        test-pool/image
>>> network    disk       vdb        iqn.2015-08.org.example:sn01/0
>>> network    disk       vdc        /image.raw
>>> network    disk       vdd        -
>>> network    disk       vde        -
>>> network    disk       vdf        image1
>>> network    disk       vdg        test-volume/image.raw
>>>
>>> The output with the patch:
>>> $ virsh domblklist $DOMAIN --details
>>> Type       Device     Target     Source
>>> ------------------------------------------------
>>> network    disk       vda        rbd://monitor1.example.org:6321/test-pool/image
>>> network    disk       vdb        iscsi://192.168.124.200:3260/iqn.2015-08.org.example:sn01/0
>>> network    disk       vdc        http://192.168.124.200:80/image.raw
>>> network    disk       vdd        nbd+unix:///var/run/nbdsock
>>> network    disk       vde        nbd://192.168.124.200:12345
>>> network    disk       vdf        sheepdog://192.168.124.200:6000/image1
>>> network    disk       vdg        gluster://192.168.124.200/test-volume/image.raw
>>
>> Is the goal to just format in some "standard" format or to use the
>> format that would be used by qemu in the command line?
> 
> While it's the former, I think we should at least cover asses and
> document that these strings have no special meaning and can change later
> if we find a better way of expressing them. Or should we?
> 

Since the Source path is provided whether or not --details is supplied,
I guess I'd be concerned if we've ever made any "guarantees" about the
format of the output for default displays and what a change like this
could break. I can tell you that when there was a change to add an extra
leading space to some display output, there were virt-tests that just
began failing because the difference between seeing "# ..." and " # ..."
in the output wasn't handled properly.

Anyway, the man page says:

Print a table showing the brief information of all block devices
associated with I<domain>. If I<--inactive> is specified, query the
block devices that will be used on the next boot, rather than those
currently in use by a running domain. If I<--details> is specified,
disk type and device value will also be printed. Other contexts
that require a block device name (such as I<domblkinfo> or
I<snapshot-create> for disk snapshots) will accept either target
or unique source names printed by this command.


Which a naive user could be led to believe that by grabbing the value in
the "Source" column (such as "nbd://192.168.124.200:12345") they could
feed that into "virsh domblkinfo $dom $Source" and it would work. In
fact, someone that can write scripts better than I could be currently
stripping that last field off and using it as input to their domblkinfo
command in order to get the Capacity, Allocation, Physical values in
some form. Yes, of course those would be "broken" today for network.
Since the test environment is already set up, Lin Ma can you at least
see what happens for the various formats if one just cut-n-pasted that
column for domblkinfo?

One option/adjustment perhaps is we only print the "details" of the
network source if --details is provided (and document it).  Or we could
add something like the following after the first sentence to virsh.pod
(for the CYA needs):

For networked storage the Source displayed uses the domain XML to
extract source protocol, transport, host name, host port, and source
name or socket data in order to format and display in a standard manner
starting with the protocol, such as:

"$protocol[+$transport]://[$host:$port][{/$name|:$socket}]"


That could be ugly difficult to display and I don't see any other
current example in a quick scan through virsh.pod.

John