On Thu, 11/02 12:02, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > One alternative approach to doing this would be to suggest that we should > instead just spawn qemu-system-x86_64 with '--machine none' and use that > as a replacement for qemu-nbd, since it already has a built-in NBD server > which can do many exports at once and arbitrary block jobs.
Here is a crazy idea from KVM Forum discussions that may relate, so mention it here: we could move the QEMU block layer to a separate program and guest can use vhost-user-{blk,scsi} for I/O. It is something like this: master-disk1.qcow2 (qemu-nbd) ^ | backing | cache-disk1.qcow2 (qemu-vhost) <-------------. ^ | | backing | backing | | +- vm-a-disk1.qcow2 (qemu-vhost) +- vm-a-disk2.qcow2 (qemu-vhost) ^ ^ | vhost-user-blk | vhost-user-blk | | +- VM-1 (qemu-system-XXX) +- VM-2 (qemu-system-XXX) So on the compute node, there will be N qemu-system-XXX processes (where N is the number of VMs) and 1 qemu-vhost process. The hypothetical qemu-vhost program needs to support QMP as well and it runs the COR/mirroring jobs from master disk to cache disk, just like what you propose to do with the extended qemu-nbd. The only difference is replacing the local NBD with vhost-user, which is more efficient. Fam