Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 1/2] qemu-error: Introduce get_errno_name()

[Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 03 May 2010 08:16:35 -0500
Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws> wrote:

> On 05/03/2010 08:06 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> > Luiz Capitulino<lcapitulino@redhat.com>  writes:
> >
> >    
> >> We need to expose errno in QMP, for three reasons:
> >>
> >>    1. Some error handling functions print errno codes to the user,
> >>       while it's debatable whether this is good or not from a user
> >>       perspective, sometimes it's the best we can do because it's
> >>       what system calls and libraries return
> >>
> >>    2. Some events (eg. BLOCK_IO_ERROR) will be made even more
> >>       complete with errno information
> >>
> >>    3. It's very good for debugging
> >>
> >> So, we need a way to expose those codes in QMP. We can't just use
> >> the codes themselfs because they may vary between systems.
> >>
> >> The best solution I can think of is to return the string
> >> representation of the name. For example, EIO becomes "EIO".
> >>
> >> This is what get_errno_name() does.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Luiz Capitulino<lcapitulino@redhat.com>
> >> ---
> >>   qemu-error.c |   85 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> >>   qemu-error.h |    1 +
> >>   2 files changed, 86 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
> >>
> >> diff --git a/qemu-error.c b/qemu-error.c
> >> index 5a35e7c..7035417 100644
> >> --- a/qemu-error.c
> >> +++ b/qemu-error.c
> >> @@ -207,3 +207,88 @@ void error_report(const char *fmt, ...)
> >>       va_end(ap);
> >>       error_printf("\n");
> >>   }
> >> +
> >> +/*
> >> + * Probably only useful for QMP
> >> + */
> >> +const char *get_errno_name(int err)
> >> +{
> >> +    switch (abs(err)) {
> >> +    case EPERM:
> >> +        return "EPERM";
> >> +    case ENOENT:
> >> +        return "ENOENT";
> >>      
> > [...]
> >    
> >> +    case EDOM:
> >> +        return "EDOM";
> >> +    case ERANGE:
> >> +        return "ERANGE";
> >> +    case ENOMEDIUM:
> >> +        return "ENOMEDIUM";
> >> +    case ENOTSUP:
> >> +        return "ENOTSUP";
> >> +    default:
> >> +        return "unknown";
> >>      
> > How did you choose the codes to implement?  POSIX has many more...

 I just ran an awk script on the linux's base errno header file, my
idea is just to have the common names, anything 'new' will hit the
default clause and we can add it later.

> Let me say another way why I think this is a bad path to go down.
> 
> In generally, we could never just pass errno through down.  Different 
> host platforms are going to generate different errno values so we really 
> need to filter and send reliable errno values so that clients don't have 
> to have special code for when they're on Linux vs. AIX vs. Solaris.

 Sorry for the potential stupid question, but what would a 'reliable'
errno be? Or, what's an unreliable errno?

 We're not sending plain integers to the clients, so the only problem
I can see is if different unices return different errnos for the
same error. Is that the problem you're seeing?

> If we're white listing errno values, we should be able to trivially 
> convert errnos to QError types via a table just like you have above.

 Having a direct errno -> QError mapping doesn't seem good for the
current use cases.

 For example, do_savevm() (not merged yet) has a StateVmSaveFailed
error which also has a 'reason' member, which would look like this
on the wire:

"{ 'class': 'StateVmSaveFailed', 'data': { 'reason': "EIO" } }"

 So, the QError class says what has failed and the errno part says
why it has failed.

 I'd be happy to implement a different solution that satisfies this
basic requirement.