Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] docs: add misc/qemu-backends.txt

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2016, Juergen Gross wrote:
> Document the interface between qemu and libxl regarding backends
> supported by qemu.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  docs/misc/qemu-backends.txt | 19 +++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 19 insertions(+)
>  create mode 100644 docs/misc/qemu-backends.txt
> 
> diff --git a/docs/misc/qemu-backends.txt b/docs/misc/qemu-backends.txt
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..f28755e
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/docs/misc/qemu-backends.txt
> @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
> +In order to know whether qemu supports a specific backend type libxl
> +needs a way to obtain this information.
> +
> +As each qemu instance owns a path (named "<qemu>" from now on) in
> +Xenstore the backend information is presented there. <qemu> is built
> +from the domain id where the qemu instance is running <backend-dom>
> +and the domain id of the target domain of the qemu process <domid>:
> +
> +<qemu> = /local/domain/<backend-dom>/device-model/<domid>
> +
> +Before signalling qemu is running by writing "running" to <qemu>/state
> +qemu will create a Xenstore node for each supported backend under
> +<qemu>/backends with the backend type as name (e.g.
> +<qemu>/backends/qdisk for the qdisk backend).
> +
> +libxl can assume a backend of a specific type <type> is supported if:
> +- <qemu>/backends/<type> is existing in Xenstore
> +- or <qemu>/backends is not existing and <type> is one of:
> +  "console", "vkbd", "vfb", "qdisk", "qnic"

The thing to be careful about is that the plan just a few months ago was
to have QEMU restrict its own xenstore connection to the privilege level
of the guest VM it was servicing. Libxl would relax the xenstore access
rights to allow QEMU (and the gueest VM) access to
/local/domain/<backend-dom>/device-model/<domid>/physmap, but nothing
else. See:

[1] http://marc.info/?l=qemu-devel&m=143317363104584&w=2
[2] http://marc.info/?l=xen-devel&m=145081000327541

what that means is that QEMU wouldn't be able to write to
/local/domain/<backend-dom>/device-model/<domid>/backends, unless the
writing was done before calling xsrestrict, which should be
doable, but not what was done in [1].

Maybe we could add a note saying that these paths need to be written by
QEMU before dropping xenstore privileges?

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