On 03/20/2018 05:00 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 05:03:11PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
If we bump NBDKIT_API_VERSION, we have forcefully made older
nbdkit reject all plugins that opt to the newer API:

$ nbdkit ./plugins/nbd/.libs/nbdkit-nbd-plugin.so --dump-plugin
nbdkit: ./plugins/nbd/.libs/nbdkit-nbd-plugin.so: plugin is incompatible with 
this version of nbdkit (_api_version = 2)

But with a bit of finesse, we can make opting in to FUA support
orthogonal to NBDKIT_API_VERSION, by introducing a new witness
level that the user controls, and by providing sane fallbacks
so that newer plugins correctly populate the fields expected by
older nbdkit.

---
v3: rework entirely, add new variable instead of NBDKIT_API_VERSION

This patch is still RFC; if you like it, it's probably better to
rebase portions of this patch into the rest of the series, rather
than churning NBDKIT_API_VERSION temporarily to 2 and now back to 1

I do wonder if this patch is really worthwhile.  Old nbdkit / new
plugin is probably going to go untested in general, and therefore will
just cause problems/complexity.

Fair enough. I'm happy to drop it (I had a tough enough time figuring out how to test it; my initial gut feel was that an old server + new plugin.so would die with an assertion failure when the old server asserted that .pread was non-NULL, and I was actually pleasantly surprised that the failure was graceful due to the incompatible version check that occurred prior to the .pread assertion. Keeping a graceful failure is acceptable; I would have been pushing for something like this a lot harder if it had actually caused assertion failures).

New nbdkit / old plugin gets plenty of testing (most of our plugins still use the old interface, where only a few opt in to the new one, and since the testsuite still passes, we've proven that both interfaces are acceptable to the new binary).

So I'll go ahead and push 1-14, and then see if I can start playing with ways to expose FUA flags through the language bindings (I'll probably attempt python first).

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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