[libvirt] hotplug support for "filesystem" devices?

Cole Robinson crobinso at redhat.com
Thu May 19 14:24:52 UTC 2016


On 05/18/2016 12:20 PM, Snyder, Emile wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm a newbie to libvirt, coming to it because I'm trying to understand how to provide the ability to attach/detach network filesystem shares to openstack guest instances in something analogous to the way block devices can be now.
> 
> While playing with the existing virtfs/9p support for qemu, I found that I can't use virsh to attach a "filesystem" device while the VM is running. For example, I create a snippet of XML like
> 
> <filesystem type='mount' accessmode='mapped'>
>   <source dir='/tmp/share'/>
>   <target dir='share_tag'/>
> </filesystem>
> 
> and then try:
> stack at devstack-8366:~/devstack$ virsh list
>  Id    Name                           State
> ----------------------------------------------------
>  3     instance-00000002              running
>  5     instance-00000004              running
>  8     instance-00000007              running
> 
> stack at devstack-8366:~/devstack$ virsh attach-device 8 share.xml
> error: Failed to attach device from share.xml
> error: Operation not supported: live attach of device 'filesystem' is not supported
> 
> 
> I see that error coming from src/qemu/qemu_driver.c in the qemuDomainAttachDeviceLive function.
> 
> Can anyone tell me if this is something that is going to be hard or easy to make possible? Pointers to where I should look in the source, or in qemu? Is anyone working it already?
> 

Unfortunately qemu currently lacks the support for virtio 9pfs hotplug AFAICT.
There's two aspects: there's the filesystem source bit, which is the qemu
-fsdev option, and then there's the guest facing -device virtio-9p*.

The latter bit is hotpluggable, there were qemu patches that said as much in
the last year. But there's no infrastructure for hotplugging fsdevs. So any
work to enable this in libvirt would have to start there.

- Cole




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