Re: [Xen-devel] Problem with PV disk and iSCSI

[Gary Grebus <ggrebus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2008-02-09 at 08:07 +0000, Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 9/2/08 06:15, "Kurt Hackel" <kurt.hackel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> >> I'm thinking blkback will have to make a dom0 copy of the page before
> >> doing the unmap if there are still extra references?
> > 
> > Can the unmap be deferred, handled by the last reference holder?  Or
> > does this open up a potential security hole?
> 
> netback already does this kind of reference counting. It oughtn't to be hard
> to check the page reference count in the blkback I/O completion handler and,
> if non-zero, set up a callback for when the count does fall to zero. And
> defer responding to the frontend until that time. Netback is even more
> sophisticated in that it also sets a time out and if the page languishes for
> too long with non-zero count, it's able to forcibly copy-and-release the
> page. I don't think we need to go that far for blkback however.

In the failure I'm seeing, the skb could sit on a socket queue
indefinitely.  The application reading the socket could be blocked for
some other reason.  blkback can't defer responding to blkfront
(completing the guest I/O).

I think blkback needs to assume that a completion with a non-zero page
reference count means it needs to make a copy, or implement a timeout
like netback.

        Gary

-- 
Gary Grebus
Virtual Iron Software, Inc.



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