Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] hvc_xen: introduce HVC_XEN_FRONTEND

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2012, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 11:30:42AM +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > Introduce a new config option HVC_XEN_FRONTEND to enable/disable the
> > xenbus based pv console frontend.
> 
> One concern I have - not with this patch - but rather with the whole
> PV consoel functionality - is how it is going to work with older 
> hypervisors/QEMU.
> 
> I am specifically thinking about Amazon EC2 or 3.4 Xen installations.
> I recall that a patch was required to QEMU to make this work flawlessly - so
> perhaps all of this code should be gated on checking fora version (so Xen 
> 4.2?)
> or by looking for a 'feature-pv-on-hvm-console' XenBus attribute?

I agree that this issue needs more thoughts about compatibility with old
xen installations, but if it is possible I would rather avoid
introducing a this-bug-is-now-fixed kind of flag.

Only xen installations supporting vfb and qemu as a console backend are
susceptible, so Amazon should be safe because I don't think they use any
of them.
Also looking through the code I have found that qemu-xen 3.4, 4.0 and
4.1 are all susceptible to this bug the same way and they can all be
fixed with the same patch.

>From the Linux side the best thing we could do is completely ignore
devices/console/0, the problem is that if we don't we are either going
to upset QEMU or xenconsoled.
If we return 0 from xencons_probe we are going to pretend everything is
normal so as a consequence the xenbus state is going to be set to 4,
upsetting xenconsoled.
If we return -ENODEV we are going to admit that the device shouldn't
even be there and in that case the xenbus drivers set the state to 6
causing the unpatched qemu to crash.
I don't think there is anything we can do within xencons_probe to avoid
the bug: what return value are we supposed to return so that the
xenbus drivers does not take any further actions?
Even a 'feature-pv-on-hvm-console' flag  wouldn't help.

Maybe we need to introduce an explicit check in xenbus_probe_device_type
to avoid calling bus->probe if type == "console" and dir[i] == "0", what
do you think?

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