qemu-e2k/docs/interop/nbd.txt
Eric Blake 58a6fdcc9e nbd/server: Allow MULTI_CONN for shared writable exports
According to the NBD spec, a server that advertises
NBD_FLAG_CAN_MULTI_CONN promises that multiple client connections will
not see any cache inconsistencies: when properly separated by a single
flush, actions performed by one client will be visible to another
client, regardless of which client did the flush.

We always satisfy these conditions in qemu - even when we support
multiple clients, ALL clients go through a single point of reference
into the block layer, with no local caching.  The effect of one client
is instantly visible to the next client.  Even if our backend were a
network device, we argue that any multi-path caching effects that
would cause inconsistencies in back-to-back actions not seeing the
effect of previous actions would be a bug in that backend, and not the
fault of caching in qemu.  As such, it is safe to unconditionally
advertise CAN_MULTI_CONN for any qemu NBD server situation that
supports parallel clients.

Note, however, that we don't want to advertise CAN_MULTI_CONN when we
know that a second client cannot connect (for historical reasons,
qemu-nbd defaults to a single connection while nbd-server-add and QMP
commands default to unlimited connections; but we already have
existing means to let either style of NBD server creation alter those
defaults).  This is visible by no longer advertising MULTI_CONN for
'qemu-nbd -r' without -e, as in the iotest nbd-qemu-allocation.

The harder part of this patch is setting up an iotest to demonstrate
behavior of multiple NBD clients to a single server.  It might be
possible with parallel qemu-io processes, but I found it easier to do
in python with the help of libnbd, and help from Nir and Vladimir in
writing the test.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Nir Soffer <nsoffer@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <v.sementsov-og@mail.ru>
Message-Id: <20220512004924.417153-3-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
2022-05-12 13:10:52 +02:00

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QEMU supports the NBD protocol, and has an internal NBD client (see
block/nbd.c), an internal NBD server (see blockdev-nbd.c), and an
external NBD server tool (see qemu-nbd.c). The common code is placed
in nbd/*.
The NBD protocol is specified here:
https://github.com/NetworkBlockDevice/nbd/blob/master/doc/proto.md
The following paragraphs describe some specific properties of NBD
protocol realization in QEMU.
= Metadata namespaces =
QEMU supports the "base:allocation" metadata context as defined in the
NBD protocol specification, and also defines an additional metadata
namespace "qemu".
== "qemu" namespace ==
The "qemu" namespace currently contains two available metadata context
types. The first is related to exposing the contents of a dirty
bitmap alongside the associated disk contents. That metadata context
is named with the following form:
qemu:dirty-bitmap:<dirty-bitmap-export-name>
Each dirty-bitmap metadata context defines only one flag for extents
in reply for NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS:
bit 0: NBD_STATE_DIRTY, set when the extent is "dirty"
The second is related to exposing the source of various extents within
the image, with a single metadata context named:
qemu:allocation-depth
In the allocation depth context, the entire 32-bit value represents a
depth of which layer in a thin-provisioned backing chain provided the
data (0 for unallocated, 1 for the active layer, 2 for the first
backing layer, and so forth).
For NBD_OPT_LIST_META_CONTEXT the following queries are supported
in addition to the specific "qemu:allocation-depth" and
"qemu:dirty-bitmap:<dirty-bitmap-export-name>":
* "qemu:" - returns list of all available metadata contexts in the
namespace.
* "qemu:dirty-bitmap:" - returns list of all available dirty-bitmap
metadata contexts.
= Features by version =
The following list documents which qemu version first implemented
various features (both as a server exposing the feature, and as a
client taking advantage of the feature when present), to make it
easier to plan for cross-version interoperability. Note that in
several cases, the initial release containing a feature may require
additional patches from the corresponding stable branch to fix bugs in
the operation of that feature.
* 2.6: NBD_OPT_STARTTLS with TLS X.509 Certificates
* 2.8: NBD_CMD_WRITE_ZEROES
* 2.10: NBD_OPT_GO, NBD_INFO_BLOCK
* 2.11: NBD_OPT_STRUCTURED_REPLY
* 2.12: NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS for "base:allocation"
* 3.0: NBD_OPT_STARTTLS with TLS Pre-Shared Keys (PSK),
NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS for "qemu:dirty-bitmap:", NBD_CMD_CACHE
* 4.2: NBD_FLAG_CAN_MULTI_CONN for shareable read-only exports,
NBD_CMD_FLAG_FAST_ZERO
* 5.2: NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS for "qemu:allocation-depth"
* 7.1: NBD_FLAG_CAN_MULTI_CONN for shareable writable exports