Re: [Qemu-devel] vNVRAM / blobstore design

[Stefan Berger <stefanb@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 03/27/2013 03:12 PM, Stefan Berger wrote:
> On 03/27/2013 02:27 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> Stefan Berger <stefanb@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>>
>>> On 03/27/2013 01:14 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>> Stefan Berger <stefanb@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>> What I struggle with is that we're calling this a "blobstore".  Using
>>>> BER to store "blobs" seems kind of pointless especially when we're
>>>> talking about exactly three blobs.
>>>>
>>>> I suspect real hardware does something like, flash is N bytes, blob 
>>>> 1 is
>>>> a max of X bytes, blob 2 is a max of Y bytes, and blob 3 is (N - X 
>>>> - Y)
>>>> bytes.
>>>>
>>>> Do we really need to do anything more than that?
>>> I typically call it NVRAM, but earlier discussions seemed to prefer
>>> 'blobstore'.
>>>
>>> Using BER is the 2nd design of the NVRAM/blobstore. The 1st one didn't
>>> use any visitors but used a directory in the first sector pointing to
>>> the actual blobs in other sectors of the block device. The organization
>>> of the directory and assignment of the blobs to their sectors, aka 'the
>>> layout of the data' in the disk image, was handled by the
>>> NVRAM/blobstore implementation.
>> Okay, the short response is:
>>
>> Just make the TPM have a DRIVE property, drop all notion of
>> NVRAM/blobstore, and used fixed offsets into the BlockDriverState for
>> each blob.
>
> Fine by me. I don't see the need for visitors. I guess sharing of the 
> persistent storage between different types of devices is not a goal 
> here so that a layer that hides the layout and the blobs' position 
> within the storage would be necessary. Also fine by me for as long as 
> we don't come back to this discussion.

One thing I'd like to get clarity about is the following corner-case. A 
user supplies some VM image as persistent storage for the TPM. It 
contains garbage. How do we handle this case? Does the TPM then just 
start writing its state into this image or do we want to have some layer 
in place that forces a user to go through the step of formatting after 
that layer indicates that the data are unreadable. Besides that a 
completely empty image also contains garbage from the perspective of TPM 
persistent state and for that layer.

My intention would (again) be to put a header in front of every blob. 
That header would contain a crc32 covering that header (minus the crc32 
field itself of course) plus the blob to determine whether the blob is 
garbage or not. It is similar in those terms as the 1st implementation 
where we also had a directory that contained that crc32 for the 
directory itself and for each blob. This is not a filesystem, I know that.

    Regards,
       Stefan