[Xen-devel] Device teardown issues

[Dan Smith <danms@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi List,

In the process of integrating dm-userspace into the xen tools, we
introduced a situation that (to my knowledge) does not normally occur
with any of the in-tree block device backends:

Our daemon takes a little bit of time to shutdown once it has received
the signal to terminate.  This means that if you quickly destroy and
re-create a domain, the daemon for the previous instance's block
device could be still hanging around when the new instance's device is
created.  This is because "xm destroy" does not wait for the devices
to be fully cleaned up before returning.  Even if we put a poll loop
in /etc/xen/scripts/block, the call to destroy a domain does not wait
for it to complete.

With the existing tools, I think it is possible to hit this issue if
you have a heavily loaded system that is using every single loop
device.  A quick destroy and re-create could fail to find a free loop
device because the one used by the just-killed domain has not been
freed up yet.

So, what would be the best way to resolve this?  My thought was to
make xend wait for all block devices to write another key into the
store when the backend script has completed, and make
XendDomainInfo.destroy() wait for all of those to come in before
returning.  Is that a valid solution?  Perhaps we would only do that
for certain device types, like dmu: and file:?

-- 
Dan Smith
IBM Linux Technology Center
Open Hypervisor Team
email: danms@xxxxxxxxxx

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