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>
58a6fdcc9e