Re: [Qemu-devel] Patch to improve handling of server sockets

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

On 05/04/10 18:23, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 05/04/2010 08:49 AM, Reinhard Max wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am maintaining the tightvnc package for openSUSE and was recently
>> confronted with an alleged vnc problem with QWMU that turned out to be
>> a shortcoming in QEMU's code for handling TCP server sockets, which is
>> used by the vnc and char modules.
>>
>> The problem occurs when the address to listen on is given as a name
>> which resolves to multiple IP addresses the most prominent example
>> being "localhost" resolving to 127.0.0.1 and ::1 .

My tigervnc (tightvnc successor) has IPv6 support and handles this just 
fine.  There is also the option to force qemu to listen on ipv4 (or 
ipv6) only.

>> The existing code stopped walking the list of addresses returned by
>> getaddrinfo() as soon as one socket was successfully opened and bound.
>> The result was that a qemu instance started with "-vnc localhost:42"
>> only listened on ::1, wasn't reachable through 127.0.0.1. The fact
>> that the code set the IPV6_V6ONLY socket option didn't help, because
>> that option only works when the socket gets bound to the IPv6 wildcard
>> address (::), but is useless for explicit address bindings.

Indeed.

> But that said, I'm not sure we're doing the wrong thing right now. Gerd,
> what do you think about this behavior?

Reinhard is correct.  If a hostname resolves to multiple addresses like 
this ...

    zweiblum kraxel ~# host zweiblum
    zweiblum.home.kraxel.org has address 192.168.2.101
    zweiblum.home.kraxel.org has IPv6 address 
2001:6f8:1cb3:2:216:41ff:fee1:3d40

... qemu should listen on all addresses returned.  Which in turn 
requires multiple listening sockets.

Changing this is a big deal though, thats why I've taken the somewhat 
unclean shortcut to listen on the first match only when implementing 
this.  Clients are supposed to try to connect to all addresses returned 
by the lookup (and they do if they got IPv6 support), thus this usually 
doesn't cause trouble in practice.

When going for multiple listening sockets in qemu we have to figure how 
we'll handle this in a number of places as there is no single listening 
address any more.  Reporting the vnc server address in QMP is one.  I'm 
sure there are more.

cheers,
   Gerd