Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC 02/10] libxl: add new hotplug interface support to hotplug script callers

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2013-01-18 at 16:24 +0000, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
> On 18/01/13 14:29, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Fri, 2012-12-21 at 17:00 +0000, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
> >> Add support to call hotplug scripts that use the new hotplug interface
> >> to the low-level functions in charge of calling hotplug scripts. This
> >> new calling convention will be used when the hotplug_version aodev
> >> field is 1.
> > 
> > Is there perhaps some way we can avoid users having to think about the
> > hotplug_version?
> > 
> > For example if we export XENBUGS_PATH as a synonym for BACKEND_PATH and
> > arrange that the new protocol involves calling action "add" and
> > "remove" (as well as the other new ones) do old scripts mostly Just Work
> > because they ignore the prepare/unprepare calls? (as a small sample
> > vif-bridge and block-nbd seem to).
> 
> I'm afraid old scripts will return an error when called with commands
> different than "add" or "remove", this is from block-common.sh:
> 
> if [ "$command" != "add" ] &&
>    [ "$command" != "remove" ]
> then
>   log err "Invalid command: $command"
>   exit 1
> fi

That's a shame.

> > Alternatively by way of backwards compat perhaps we could provide a
> > wrapper script? So if today you use script="/my-custom-script" you would
> > switch to script="/etc/xen/hotplug-compat-wrapper /my-custom-script" and
> > the wrapper would shim or ignore the new calls into the old?
> 
> Well, from a user point of view, this will still be the same, old
> hotplug scripts will be called using the "script" config option, so
> there will be no need to change configuration files. The only difference
> is that when calling hotplug scripts using the new hotplug interface
> users should use "method" instead of "script" in their config file, as
> an example this would be the diskspec line to attach a disk using the
> iSCSI block script:
> 
> 'method=block-iscsi,vdev=xvda,target=iqn=iqn.1994-04.org.netbsd.iscsi-target:target0,portal=192.168.1.128'
> 
> Users don't have to deal directly with hotplug_version, I think forcing
> them to user a wrapper is worse, because that will mean modifications to
> config files when updating.

But "users" of libxl do need to care about hotplug_version?

I'm not sure what the answer is here but it would be good if everyone
writing a toolstack using libxl didn't have to think about what kind of
script each one was calling.

Could we perhaps mandate the new scripts have a certain comment or other
grepable property or that they must react without error to a particular
probing command line option "--are-you-a-v2-script" and have libxl probe
using that?

Ian.


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