Re: [PATCH 0/2] dm mpath: Interface for explicit probing of active paths

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 12:11:49PM +0200, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> If you're talking about SG_IO in dm-mpath, then PRIN/PROUT commands are
> actually the one thing that we don't need. libmpathpersist sends the
> commands to the individual path devices, so dm-mpath will never see
> those. It's mostly about getting the full results on the SCSI level for
> normal I/O commands.
> 
> There has actually been a patch series on qemu-devel last year (that I
> haven't found the time to review properly yet) that would add explicit
> persistent reservation operations to QEMU's block layer that could then
> be used with the emulated scsi-hd device. On the backend, it only
> implemented it for iscsi, but I suppose we could implement it for
> file-posix, too (using the same libmpathpersist code as for
> passthrough). If that works, maybe at least some users can move away
> from SCSI passthrough.

Please call into the kernel PR code instead of hacking up more of
this, which will just run into problems again.

> The thing that we need to make sure, though, is that the emulated status
> we can expose to the guest is actually good enough. That Paolo said that
> the problem with reservation conflicts was mostly because -EBADE wasn't
> a thing yet gives me some hope that at least this wouldn't be a problem
> any more today.

And if you need more information we can add that to the kernel PR API.