Re: [Nbd] [RESEND][PATCH 0/5] nbd improvements

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 15/09/2016 17:23, Alex Bligh wrote:
> Paolo,
> 
>> On 15 Sep 2016, at 15:07, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I don't think QEMU forbids multiple clients to the single server, and
>> guarantees consistency as long as there is no overlap between writes and
>> reads.  These are the same guarantees you have for multiple commands on
>> a single connection.
>>
>> In other words, from the POV of QEMU there's no difference whether
>> multiple commands come from one or more connections.
> 
> This isn't really about ordering, it's about cache coherency
> and persisting things to disk.
> 
> What you say is correct as far as it goes in terms of ordering. However
> consider the scenario with read and writes on two channels as follows
> of the same block:
> 
>      Channel1     Channel2
> 
>      R                      Block read, and cached in user space in
>                             channel 1's cache
>                             Reply sent
> 
>                   W         New value written, channel 2's cache updated
>                             channel 1's cache not
> 
>      R                      Value returned from channel 1's cache.
> 
> 
> In the above scenario, there is a problem if the server(s) handling the
> two channels each use a read cache which is not coherent between the
> two channels. An example would be a read-through cache on a server that
> did fork() and shared no state between connections.

qemu-nbd does not fork(), so there is no coherency issue if W has replied.

However, if W hasn't replied, channel1 can get garbage.  Typically the
VM will be the one during writes, everyone else must be ready to handle
whatever mess the VM throws at them.

Paolo

> Similarly, if there is a write on channel 1 that has completed, and
> the flush goes to channel 2, it may not (if state is not shared) guarantee
> that the write on channel 1 (which has completed) is persisted to non-volatile
> media. Obviously if the 'state' is OS block cache/buffers/whatever, it
> will, but if it's (e.g.) a user-space per process write-through cache,
> it won't.
> 
> I don't know whether qemu-nbd is likely to suffer from either of these.

It can't happen.  On the other hand, channel1 must be ready to handle
garbage, it's illegal.

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