Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] nbd-client: enable TCP keepalive

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

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On 6/5/19 12:05 PM, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:

>> By enabling TCP keepalives we are explicitly making the connection
>> less reliable by forcing it to be terminated when keepalive
>> threshold triggers, instead of waiting longer for TCP to recover.
>>
>> The rationale s that once a connection has been in a hung state for
>> so long that keepalive triggers, its (hopefully) not useful to the
>> mgmt app to carry on waiting anyway.
>>
>> If the connection is terminated by keepalive & the mgmt app then
>> spawns a new client to carry on with the work, what are the risks
>> involved ? eg Could packets from the stuck, terminated, connection
>> suddenly arrive later and trigger I/O with outdated data payload ?
> 
> Hmm, I believe that tcp guarantees isolation between different connections
> 
>>
>> I guess this is no different a situation from an app explicitly
>> killing the QEMU NBD client process instead & spawning a new one.
>>
>> I'm still feeling a little uneasy about enabling it unconditionally
>> though, since pretty much everything I know which supports keepalives
>> has a way to turn them on/off at least, even if you can't tune the
>> individual timer settings.
> 
> Hm. So, I can add bool keepalive parameter for nbd format with default to true.
> And if needed, it may be later extended to be qapi 'alternate' of bool or struct with
> three numeric parameters, corresponding to TCP_KEEPCNT, TCP_KEEPIDLE and TCP_KEEPINTVL .
> 
> Opinions?

Adding a bool that could later turn into a qapi 'alternate' for
fine-tuning seems reasonable. Defaulting the bool to true is not
backwards-compatible; better would be defaulting it to false and letting
users opt-in; introspection will also work to let you know whether the
feature is present.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org


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