The problem with this approach is that you end up using two instances
of whatever virtual disk code you want. In the case of raw writes to
an image file (tap:aio) this is more or less okay, except for the fact
that qemu has a bad habit of buffering writes and so you can get stuck
in a nasty late write race when you switch from emulated writes over
to using pv drivers.
For non-raw writes this is worse, because most of the image file
drivers cache metadata in memory and don't necessarily pick up changes
to the image files when you switch from emulated to pv. Also, the
disparate implementations make me a bit nervous about headers exactly
matching and so on.
The intention of the phantom device is to try to keep things down to a
single data path, and a single driver implementation.
a.
On 6/29/07, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 09:18:50AM -0700, Andrew Warfield wrote:
> If you can send some more details on the crash we should be able to
> sort this out -- it's certainly something that has worked in the past.
Ok, so here's the scenario. Traditionally with HVM I have a disk
file:/xen/rhel4i386.img,hda,w
Having seen the changeset 13827:6524e02edbeb I tried
tap:aio:/xen/rhel4i386.img,hda,w
And
tap:aio:/xen/rhel4i386.img,xvda,w
The latter is the preferred, since paravirt drivers should not be hijacking
the IDE devices inside the guest. However, the changeset 13827 doesn't seem
to support xvd* since QEMU filters out any devices with such a name.
With vanilla Xen 3.1.0 qemu goes defunct when starting the guest
logging
qemu: could not open hard disk image 'aio:/xen/rhel4i386.img'
After a little investigation I found that in BlktapController
try:
imagetype = self.vm.info['image']['type']
except:
imagetype = ""
Has long ago been broken and should instead be
try:
imagetype = self.vm.info.image_type()
except:
imagetype = ""
Once I made that change I can see a phantom device being created, but QEMU
still crashes & burns with qemu-dm-XXXX.log showing
qemu: could not open hard disk image '/dev/xvdc1'
I started to debug this, but looking at changeset 13827:6524e02edbeb I rapidly
came to the conclusion that the whole idea of phantom devices is complete
overkill & the entire problem could be addressed with a couple of lines in
ioemu/xenstore.c. QEMU already knows how to handle all the different
types of file format blktap does, so there's no need to setup extra phantom
devices. All thats needed is for QEMU to a) strip the aio: (or equivalent)
prefix and b) convert xvdN -> hdN if required.
So I'm attaching two patches. The first reverts 13827:6524e02edbeb
and the second tweaks ioemu/xenstore.c so it can handle blktap devices
directly. With these applied ontop of Xen 3.1.0 I can successfully
start HVM guests using the two example tap:aio lines I show earlier
in this mail. The patch also adds a couple of logging lines which
end up in qemu-dm-XXX.log as they'll be useful if ever debugging QEMU
boot issues - it is far too silent when things go wrong which makes
diagnosis hard.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Berrange <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>
The patch being reverted:
$ diffstat xen-revert-phantom.patch
ioemu/xenstore.c | 46 ---------------------
python/xen/xend/XendConfig.py | 41 -------------------
python/xen/xend/XendDomainInfo.py | 58 ---------------------------
python/xen/xend/server/BlktapController.py | 62 -----------------------------
python/xen/xend/server/DevController.py | 13 ------
5 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 217 deletions(-)
The new patch:
$ diffstat xen-qemu-blktap.patch
xenstore.c | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
1 file changed, 26 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
Regards,
Dan.
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