Re: [PATCH] Fix restore handling checks

[Michal Novotny <minovotn@redhat.com>]

On 06/23/2010 02:04 PM, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Michal Novotny writes ("Re: [PATCH] Fix restore handling checks"):
>    
>> Are you saying that it's OK for administrators to violate the IDE specs
>> and do it the way that is should never be done since this way it's not
>> working on bare-metal systems ? This is the breach and it shouldn't be
>> done this way so why to allow it? Shouldn't we care the code complies
>> with the specifications to have it done the right way?
>>      
> The job of the programmer is to give effect to the wishes of the
> users, not to comply with rules from elsewhere.  If the wishes of the
> users conflict with rules from elsewhere, including specs, then the
> programmer should do what the user wants.
>
> Ian.
>    
Right but I don't think someone uses the read-only IDE drives or 
read-only drives in general - at least for HVM guests since just few 
days I posted the patch to disallow write to the read-only devices on 
ioemu - maybe you remember I did post the patch at [1]. Before this 
patch applied the read-only disks were treated as read-write always no 
matter what the state of disk device was present in the xenstore so why 
not to teach the users the right things according to the specs. This 
shouldn't break anything if you consider you added my patch to xen-ioemu 
just 13 days ago and I find it rather confusing to let users define 
read-only IDE disks which is not right according to the specs, this 
means that by allowing it we could confuse the users so that they can 
think that read-only IDE disks does exists even according to the specs 
and they may try to think that the bare-metal IDE disks does support it 
as well. Since this shouldn't break anything why shouldn't we do the 
things the right way? They have SCSI disks and PV drivers if they want 
read-only disks after all.

Michal

[1] 
http://xenbits.xensource.com/gitweb?p=qemu-xen-unstable.git;a=commit;h=6392763643311272590ef5c6f75ba11d5b132585

-- 
Michal Novotny<minovotn@redhat.com>, RHCE
Virtualization Team (xen userspace), Red Hat