Re: [RFC v2 8/9] HACK libxl_exec: Check QEMU status via QMP instead of xenstore

From: Anthony PERARD <anthony.perard@citrix.com>
To: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@citrix.com>
Cc: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org, Wei Liu <wei.liu2@citrix.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC v2 8/9] HACK libxl_exec: Check QEMU status via QMP instead of xenstore
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2018 17:54:53 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180423165453.GH1980@perard> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <23258.13149.123196.867924@mariner.uk.xensource.com>

On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 07:37:17PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Anthony PERARD writes ("[RFC v2 8/9] HACK libxl_exec: Check QEMU status via QMP instead of xenstore"):
> > When QEMU is restricted, the qemu on the receiving side cann't write
> > anything to xenstore once the migration is started. So it cann't tell
> > libxl that it is ready to continue running the guest.
> ...
> > This patch creates a pipe, give the write-end to qemu, and wait for
> > something to be written to it. (We could check if it is actually the QMP
> > greeting message.)
> 
> This is indeed the kind of thing I had in mind in our IRL
> conversation.

Good, where are heading in the right direction.

> > QEMU is asked to setup a QMP server on this pipe, but even if it is a
> > one-way only, qemu will write the QMP greeting message to the pipe.
> > This is done with:
> > -add-fd, to create a fdset which is use later.
> > -chardev 'file,path=/dev/fdset/1,append=true', this open a char device
> > on the write-end of the pipe, tell qemu that the FD is write-only, and
> > not to run truncate on it.
> > -mon, just start the QMP server on this new chardev.
> 
> Have you considered socketpair() ?  That avoids the oddnes of passing
> qemu a write-only fd.

I did considered to pass an open socket to QEMU, I didn't know that
socketpair() existed. But I don't think that would help with the current
version of QEMU (2.11 and older). There are only two ways to give a
file descriptor to qemu, these are:
  -chardev pipe,..
  -chardev file,...
And in both case, QEMU is only going to write to the fd anyway.

But, with the to be release QEMU 2.12, there is a new interface that
allow to pre-open a socket:
  -chardev socket,fd=?
See https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commit;h=0935700f8544033ebbd41e1f13cd528f8a58d24d

With that, we could open our usual "/var/run/xen/qmp-libxl-$domid"
socket for QEMU. That would work when the retricted fonctionnality is
also available. But that cann't be use unconditionnaly.

-- 
Anthony PERARD

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