qemu-e2k/docs/interop/nbd.txt
Eric Blake 2dcbb11b39 nbd/server: Add FLAG_PAYLOAD support to CMD_BLOCK_STATUS
Allow a client to request a subset of negotiated meta contexts.  For
example, a client may ask to use a single connection to learn about
both block status and dirty bitmaps, but where the dirty bitmap
queries only need to be performed on a subset of the disk; forcing the
server to compute that information on block status queries in the rest
of the disk is wasted effort (both at the server, and on the amount of
traffic sent over the wire to be parsed and ignored by the client).

Qemu as an NBD client never requests to use more than one meta
context, so it has no need to use block status payloads.  Testing this
instead requires support from libnbd, which CAN access multiple meta
contexts in parallel from a single NBD connection; an interop test
submitted to the libnbd project at the same time as this patch
demonstrates the feature working, as well as testing some corner cases
(for example, when the payload length is longer than the export
length), although other corner cases (like passing the same id
duplicated) requires a protocol fuzzer because libnbd is not wired up
to break the protocol that badly.

This also includes tweaks to 'qemu-nbd --list' to show when a server
is advertising the capability, and to the testsuite to reflect the
addition to that output.

Of note: qemu will always advertise the new feature bit during
NBD_OPT_INFO if extended headers have alreay been negotiated
(regardless of whether any NBD_OPT_SET_META_CONTEXT negotiation has
occurred); but for NBD_OPT_GO, qemu only advertises the feature if
block status is also enabled (that is, if the client does not
negotiate any contexts, then NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS cannot be used, so
the feature is not advertised).

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-ID: <20230925192229.3186470-26-eblake@redhat.com>
[eblake: fix logic to reject unnegotiated contexts]
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
2023-10-05 11:02:08 -05:00

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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
* 8.2: NBD_OPT_EXTENDED_HEADERS, NBD_FLAG_BLOCK_STATUS_PAYLOAD