Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 2/4] xenbus: limit when state is forced to closed

["Jürgen Groß" <jgross@suse.com>]

On 09.12.19 15:06, Durrant, Paul wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jürgen Groß <jgross@suse.com>
>> Sent: 09 December 2019 13:39
>> To: Durrant, Paul <pdurrant@amazon.com>; Roger Pau Monné
>> <roger.pau@citrix.com>
>> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org; Stefano
>> Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>; Boris Ostrovsky
>> <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 2/4] xenbus: limit when state is forced to
>> closed
>>
>> On 09.12.19 13:19, Durrant, Paul wrote:
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Jürgen Groß <jgross@suse.com>
>>>> Sent: 09 December 2019 12:09
>>>> To: Durrant, Paul <pdurrant@amazon.com>; Roger Pau Monné
>>>> <roger.pau@citrix.com>
>>>> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org;
>> Stefano
>>>> Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>; Boris Ostrovsky
>>>> <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 2/4] xenbus: limit when state is forced
>> to
>>>> closed
>>>>
>>>> On 09.12.19 13:03, Durrant, Paul wrote:
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: Jürgen Groß <jgross@suse.com>
>>>>>> Sent: 09 December 2019 11:55
>>>>>> To: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@citrix.com>; Durrant, Paul
>>>>>> <pdurrant@amazon.com>
>>>>>> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org;
>>>> Stefano
>>>>>> Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>; Boris Ostrovsky
>>>>>> <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 2/4] xenbus: limit when state is
>> forced
>>>> to
>>>>>> closed
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 09.12.19 12:39, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 02:01:21PM +0000, Paul Durrant wrote:
>>>>>>>> Only force state to closed in the case when the toolstack may need
>> to
>>>>>>>> clean up. This can be detected by checking whether the state in
>>>>>> xenstore
>>>>>>>> has been set to closing prior to device removal.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I'm not sure I see the point of this, I would expect that a failure
>> to
>>>>>>> probe or the removal of the device would leave the xenbus state as
>>>>>>> closed, which is consistent with the actual driver state.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Can you explain what's the benefit of leaving a device without a
>>>>>>> driver in such unknown state?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And more concerning: did you check that no frontend/backend is
>>>>>> relying on the closed state to be visible without closing having been
>>>>>> set before?
>>>>>
>>>>> Blkfront doesn't seem to mind and I believe the Windows PV drivers
>> cope,
>>>> but I don't really understand the comment since this patch is actually
>>>> removing a case where the backend transitions directly to closed.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not speaking of blkfront/blkback only, but of net, tpm, scsi,
>> pvcall
>>>> etc. frontends/backends. After all you are modifying a function common
>>>> to all PV driver pairs.
>>>>
>>>> You are removing a state switc to "closed" in case the state was _not_
>>>> "closing" before.
>>>
>>> Yes, which AFAIK is against the intention of the generic PV protocol
>> such that it ever existed anyway.
>>
>> While this might be the case we should _not_ break any guests
>> running now. So this kind of reasoning is dangerous.
>>
>>>
>>>> So any PV driver reacting to "closed" of the other end
>>>> in case the previous state might not have been "closing" before is at
>>>> risk to misbehave with your patch.
>>>
>>> Well, they will see nothing now. If the state was not closing, it gets
>> left alone, so the frontend shouldn't do anything. The only risk that I
>> can see is that some frontend/backend pair needed a direct 4 -> 6
>> transition to support 'unbind' before but AFAIK nothing has ever supported
>> that, and blk and net crash'n'burn if you try that on upstream as it
>> stands. A clean unplug would always set state to 5 first, since that's
>> part of the unplug protocol.
>>
>> That was my question: are you sure all current and previous
>> guest frontends and backends are handling unplug this way?
>>
>> Not "should handle", but "do handle".
> 
> That depends on the toolstack. IIUC the only 'supported' toolstack is xl/libxl, which will set 'state' to 5 and 'online' to 0 to initiate an unplug.

I guess libvirt/libxl is doing the same?

At least at SUSE we still have some customers running xend based
Xen installations with recent Linux or Windows guests.


Juergen