On 01/20/2015 04:35 PM, Nicholas A. Bellinger wrote:
As a proof-of-concept, I've implemented a Gluster backend handler. I'm
looking for code review and collaborators, as well as suggestions on
what other userspace handlers we might want to work on. Tape or optical
jukebox emulation? VMDK files?? Video RAM???
How about a user-space handler for qcow2, so we could have a mechanism
for exposing qcow2 images into KVM guest using vhost-scsi export..?
Ideally there would be a library that QEMU provides so that from TCMU's
user-space handler perspective, it's simply issuing fd reads/writes into
qcow2 library code that is doing the fancy feature stuff outside of
user-space handler logic..
Reusing qemu's BlockDriver support would enable LIO luns to be backed
not just by qcow2 files, but by pretty much EVERY image format, plus
Gluster, Ceph, sheepdog, all in one go.
The obstacle is that there is not a library. The programs in qemu like
qemu-img and qemu-nbd that share blockdriver code are in the qemu tree
and just link in the block .o files. The most straightforward solution
is to add a qemu-lio-tcmu.so that similarly statically links in all the
BlockDrivers, and is also a tcmu-runner handler module.
The issues with this are:
1) Getting the qemu build system to do what we want. It has an elaborate
build system and I lack build-fu. I got this working about 5 months ago
but then my changes experienced bitrot.
2) Code-wise, decide on whether to be a user of the qemu block
subsystem, or to pretend to *be* the qemu block subsystem. If we're a
user then we get nice APIs like bdrv_pwrite() that hide things like
async or coroutines from us, but require us to call qemu_init_main_loop,
which does a lot of stuff that assumes it's its own process, mucks with
signals, etc. If we pretend to be the block subsystem then we need to do
ourselves much of what the block subsystem does, to use all of the
registered BlockDrivers in the way they expect.
3) Get it accepted into qemu. Qemu developers' interest in LIO is that a
baremetal instance booted off an iscsi lun, and the lun is backed by a
qcow2 file, enables snapshots & migration between the baremetal and virt
really easily. This involves us supporting QMP, the qemu remote
configuration protocol. Which sounds weird to me. Check out this msg and
others on the thread:
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-09/msg00920.html
I'm still confused, honestly. I think we just want the blockdrivers, and
to not have to maintain them ourselves, but need a solution the qemu
developers will accept, too.
-- Andy
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