Re: [Qemu-devel] chardev's and fd's in monitors

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 12:42:01PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > * Daniel P. Berrange (berrange@redhat.com) wrote:
> >> On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 10:55:52AM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> >> 
> >> Our code has increasingly converted to propagate errors up the call
> >> chain, but having a mix of different error reporting approaches
> >> is increasingly causing pain.
> >> 
> >> eg a function which propagates errors wants to call into a function
> >> whicih uses error_report
> 
> When you add an Error * parameter to a function, you get to convert
> everything it calls.  Failure to do so is a bug, simple as that.
> 
> Likewise, when you add a new call to a function that takes an Error *
> parameter.

I agree its a bug - just that from a pragmatic POV it isn't always
practical to convert the entire call chain in one big bang - particularly
if you are working on shared infrastructure. For example, the
qemu-sockets.c APIs for connecting & listening on unix/tcp sockets
use Error * to report errors. Those APIs were used in the block
layer, migration, vnc, chardev and network backend code. It clearly
isn't practical to convert all those regions to code to correctly
propagate Error ** in one go. That's certainly the desired end
goal IMHO, but getting there is going to take a while.

This slow conversion has been going on for a long time now, so
maybe we need to make an aggressive push in strategic areas of
the code to stop it dragging out indefinitely. This is kind of
a general problem we have in QEMU - we have introduced lots of
new standard frameworks, but very rarely finish converting
code to use them.  This is why I did a big push to try to get
everything switched over to use QIOChannel, in the shortest
possible time, rather than doing only small bits over many
releases.

> >>                          - there's no nice way to propagate the error
> >> since it has already been reported.  If the function then wants to
> >> explicitly ignore the error, then that's impossible too,since it has
> >> already been reported.  Add in our code which doesn't use error_report
> >> and instead returns errno values, such as the block layer, and it gets
> >> even worse because if that calls a function which propagates an error,
> >> it has to throw away that useful error and return a useless invented
> >> errno value :(
> 
> Different bug: when you receive an Error, you have to either handle and
> consume it, or pass it on.  Throwing it away and returning an error code
> instead counts as neither, and is a bug.

Totally agree its a bug - just again hits the reality of having to
do major code conversions.

> >> IMHO continuing to convert code to propagate errors is the only way
> >> out of this swamp, because it provides the greatest flexibility to
> >> the callers of said functions to decide how to deal with the error.
> 
> I wouldn't call the whole situation a swamp.  error_report() is just
> fine in many places.  So is returning -errno.  We convert to Error when
> these techniques cease to be fine.  The swampy part is old code where
> these techniques have never been fine, or at least not for a while.  To
> be drained incrementally.

Realistically all the major backend subsystems (chardev, network, block,
ui and migration) need to be converted to Error ** propagation, since
they all ultimately call into some common code that reports Error **.
Very few places will end up being able to stick with -errno, or plain
error_report in the long term.

Regards,
Daniel
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