[libvirt] [PATCH 2/2] virDomainLockManagerAddImage: Recursively lock backing chain

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Wed Sep 9 08:49:16 UTC 2015


On Wed, Sep 09, 2015 at 10:13:24AM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 08.09.2015 18:04, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>> following backing chain: D (top) -> B -> C (bottom), because in
> >>> both cases B and C are there just for reading. In order to
> >>> achieve that we must lock the rest of backing chain with
> >>> VIR_LOCK_MANAGER_RESOURCE_SHARED flag.
> >>
> >> See below ...
> > 
> >>> +
> >>> +        if (!src->path)
> >>> +            break;
> >>> +
> >>> +        VIR_DEBUG("Add disk %s", src->path);
> >>> +        if (virLockManagerAddResource(lock,
> >>> +                                      VIR_LOCK_MANAGER_RESOURCE_TYPE_DISK,
> >>> +                                      src->path,
> >>> +                                      0,
> >>> +                                      NULL,
> >>> +                                      diskFlags) < 0) {
> >>> +            VIR_DEBUG("Failed add disk %s", src->path);
> >>> +            goto cleanup;
> >>> +        }
> >>> +
> >>> +        /* Now that we've added the first disk (top layer of backing chain)
> >>> +         * into the lock manager, let's traverse the rest of the backing chain
> >>> +         * and lock each layer for RO. This should prevent accidentally
> >>> +         * starting a domain with RW disk from the middle of the chain. */
> >>> +        diskFlags = VIR_LOCK_MANAGER_RESOURCE_SHARED;
> >>
> >> The VIR_LOCK_MANAGER_RESOURCE_SHARED flag means "shared, writable" mode
> >> according to lock_driver.h, I think you want to lock it with
> >> VIR_LOCK_MANAGER_RESOURCE_READONLY.
> > 
> > Yep, backing files should be marked readonly - 'shared' will allow
> > multiple VMs to write to the image at once. So you've only provided
> > mutual exclusion between an exclusive writer, vs a shared writer.
> 
> Except that both of our locking drivers threat
> VIR_LOCK_MANAGER_RESOURCE_READONLY as no-op.
>
> But I think that since shared and exclusive writer are mutually
> exclusive, it doesn't matter that the lower layers are locked as shared
> writer. As soon as somebody wants to lock it exclusively they will fail.
> Nor virtlockd nor sanlock is actually enforcing the RO vs RW policy (if
> a file is locked for RO no writes are allowed). It's merely for tracking
> shared and exclusive locks.

Right, so I remember why we ignore READONLY locks now - we were only
trying to protect against 2 processes /writing/ to the same image at
once, which would cause unrecoverable data corruption.

We were not trying to protect against one guest having a disk readonly
while another guest has the disk read-write. That is bad because the
guest holding the image readonly will see inconsistent filesystem
state which may result in it kernel panicing. But the underling disk
is still only written by one guest at a time, so there's no disk
image corruption.

This is similar to the scenario you illustrated with backing files.
One guest had a backing file open for write, and another guest had
it open readonly by virtue of having an upper layer open for write.
We're not actually going to suffer data corription of the backing
file here since we're still protected to not have concurrent writes
to it.

We are going to destroy the upper layer image, by invalidating the
backing file, but that is true regardless of whether another guest
has the upper layer open right now or not.

So in fact I think there's a case to say that this entire patch
is out of scope for the lock managers, as their goal is to prevent
concurrent writes to an image, not to protect against administrator
screwups with backing file writing.

Regards,
Daniel
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