Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] block: disable I/O limits at the beginning of bdrv_close()

[Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>]

On Mon 28 Sep 2015 02:18:33 AM CEST, Fam Zheng <famz@redhat.com> wrote:

>> > Can this be abused? If I have a guest running in a cloud where the
>> > cloud provider has put severe throttling limits on me, but lets me
>> > hotplug to my heart's content, couldn't I just repeatedly
>> > plug/unplug the disk to get around the throttling (every time I
>> > unplug, all writes flush at full speed, then I immediately replug
>> > to start batching up a new set of writes).  In other words,
>> > shouldn't the draining still be throttled, to prevent my abuse?
>> 
>> I didn't think about this case, and I don't know how practical this
>> is, but note that bdrv_drain() (which is already at the beginning of
>> bdrv_close()) flushes the I/O queue explicitly bypassing the limits,
>> so other cases where a user can trigger a bdrv_drain() would also be
>> vulnerable to this.
>
> Yes, the issue is pre-existing. This patch only reordered things
> inside bdrv_close() so it's no worse.
>
> But indeed there is this vulnerability, maybe we should throttle the
> queue in all cases?

I would like to see a test case with numbers that show how much you can
actually bypass the I/O limits.

Berto