[Qemu-devel] [RFC] Intermediate block mirroring

[Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>]

Hello,

I mentioned this some time ago, but I'd like to retake it now: I'm
checking how to copy arbitrary nodes on a backing chain, so if I have
e.g.

   [A] <- [B] <- [C] <- [D]

I'd like to end up with

   [A] <- [E] <- [C] <- [D]

where [E] is a copy of [B]. The most obvious use case is to move [B]
to a different storage backend.

At the moment we can already copy [B] into [E] (outside QEMU) and then
do

   change-backing-file device=[D] image-node-name=[C] backing-file=[E]

However this only changes the image on disk and the bs->backing_file
string in memory. QEMU keeps using the [B] BlockDriverState, and we
need to make it switch to [E].

One possible way to do this would be to modify blockdev-mirror so the
source image can be located anywhere on a chain. Currently there's
bs->backing_blocker preventing that, plus qmp_blockdev_mirror()
refuses to take any non-root source node. Other than permission
changes I don't think the algorithm itself needs any additional
modification, although I suppose we'd like to change the backing file
as part of the same job, and that would require API changes.

One other way is to have a more generic replace-node command which
would call bdrv_replace_node(), but I don't know if we want to expose
that and I don't have any other use case for it at the moment.

Opinions, comments?

Berto