Re: [Qemu-devel] [libvirt] [PATCH 3/3] gtk: add devices menu to allow changing removable block devices

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 08:52:59AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 10:40:06AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >> Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com> writes:
> >> >> >> +
> >> >> >> +        if (strcmp(type, "ide-cd") == 0) {
> >> >> >> +            disk_type = DT_CDROM;
> >> >> >> +        } else if (strcmp(type, "isa-fdc") == 0) {
> >> >> >> +            disk_type = DT_FLOPPY;
> >> >> >> +        } else {
> >> >> >> +            disk_type = DT_NORMAL;
> >> >> >> +        }
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Same thing here, comparing against strings is a hack. Devices should
> >> >> > probably have a property that says what kind of device they are.
> >> >> 
> >> >> Ack, this is nasty.  I would like to eliminate this.  There is a type
> >> >> field in BlockInfo but:
> >> >> 
> >> >> # @type: This field is returned only for compatibility reasons, it should
> >> >> #        not be used (always returns 'unknown')
> >> >> 
> >> >> I vaguely remember this happening but I don't remember the specific
> >> >> reason why.  I would definitely prefer that we filled out type
> >> >> correctly.
> >> >> 
> >> >> I think Markus was involved in this.  Markus or Luiz, do you remember
> >> >> the story here?
> >> >
> >> > The reason is that BlockInfo is about the backend and it simply doesn't
> >> > know (ever since we introduced if=none, this was buggy, so we just
> >> > abandoned it at some point). We would have to ask the device, not the
> >> > block layer.
> >> 
> >> Yes, this makes sense.  We could introduce an interface that all disks
> >> implemented that returned information about whether it was a CD-ROM,
> >> Floppy, etc.
> >> 
> >> How does libvirt cope with this today?  I presume they do something
> >> similar to what this patch is doing in terms of hard coding device
> >> names.
> >
> > Sorry, not really sure what your question is here - how does libvirt
> > cope with what exactly ?
> 
> Given a device, how do you figure out if it's a cdrom/floppy/whatever
> without hard coding a mapping of class name -> device type.
> 
> Pretty sure libvirt just has a class name mapping, right?

The only place where we'd ever need todo that is when we reverse engineer
a libvirt XML config from a set of QEMU command line args. For that we
just look at the if=XXX parameter currently. Our reverse engineering code
is currently broken for if=none scenarios, due mostly to our laziness
in writing code to parse the corresponding -device arg.


Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|