Re: RFC: tracking valid backing chain issue

[Nikolay Shirokovskiy <nshirokovskiy@virtuozzo.com>]

On 21.10.2020 13:56, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 20.10.2020 um 12:29 hat Nikolay Shirokovskiy geschrieben:
>>
>>
>> On 20.10.2020 13:23, Nikolay Shirokovskiy wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 20.10.2020 11:50, Kevin Wolf wrote:
>>>> Am 20.10.2020 um 10:21 hat Nikolay Shirokovskiy geschrieben:
>>>>> Hi, all.
>>>>>
>>>>> I recently found a corner case when it is impossible AFAIK to find out valid
>>>>> backing chain after block commit operation. Imagine committing top image. After
>>>>> commit ready state pivot is sent and then mgmt crashed. So far so good. Upon
>>>>> next start mgmt can either check block job status for non-autodissmised job or
>>>>> inspect backing chain to infer was pivot was successful or not in case of older
>>>>> qemu.
>>>>>
>>>>> But imagine after mgmt crash qemu process was destroyed too. In this case there
>>>>> is no option to know now what is valid backing chain. Yeah libvirt starts qemu
>>>>> process with -no-shutdown flags so process is not destroyed in case of shutdown
>>>>> but still process can crash.
>>>>
>>>> I don't think this is a problem.
>>>>
>>>> Between completion of the job and finalising it, both the base node and
>>>> the top node are equivalent. You can access either and you'll always get
>>>> the same data.
>>>>
>>>> So if libvirt didn't save that the job was already completed, it will
>>>> use the old image file, and it's fine. And if libvirt already sent the
>>>> job-finalize command, it will first have saved that the job was
>>>> completed and therefore use the new image, and it's fine, too.
>>>
>>> So finalizing can't fail? Otherwise libvirt can save that job is completed and
>>> graph is changed while is was really wasn't
>>
>> Hmm, it is even not the matter of qemu. Libvirt can save that job is completed
>> and then crash before sending command to finalize to qemu. So after qemu crash
>> and libvirt start libvirt would think that valid backing chain is without
>> top image which is not true.
> 
> Why not? During this time the top and base image are equally valid to be
> used as the active image.
> 
> If QEMU hadn't switched from top to base yet when it crashed, it's still
> no problem if libvirt does the switch when restarting QEMU.
> 

Now it clear. Thanx for explanation.

Nikolay