Re: [PATCH] qapi: deprecate drive-backup

[Peter Krempa]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 15:59:00 +0300, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
> Modern way is using blockdev-add + blockdev-backup, which provides a
> lot more control on how target is opened.
> 
> As example of drive-backup problems consider the following:
> 
> User of drive-backup expects that target will be opened in the same
> cache and aio mode as source. Corresponding logic is in
> drive_backup_prepare(), where we take bs->open_flags of source.
> 
> It works rather bad if source was added by blockdev-add. Assume source
> is qcow2 image. On blockdev-add we should specify aio and cache options
> for file child of qcow2 node. What happens next:
> 
> drive_backup_prepare() looks at bs->open_flags of qcow2 source node.
> But there no BDRV_O_NOCAHE neither BDRV_O_NATIVE_AIO: BDRV_O_NOCAHE is
> places in bs->file->bs->open_flags, and BDRV_O_NATIVE_AIO is nowhere,
> as file-posix parse options and simply set s->use_linux_aio.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <vsementsov@virtuozzo.com>
> ---
> 
> Hi all! I remember, I suggested to deprecate drive-backup some time ago,
> and nobody complain.. But that old patch was inside the series with
> other more questionable deprecations and it did not landed.
> 
> Let's finally deprecate what should be deprecated long ago.
> 
> We now faced a problem in our downstream, described in commit message.
> In downstream I've fixed it by simply enabling O_DIRECT and linux_aio
> unconditionally for drive_backup target. But actually this just shows
> that using drive-backup in blockdev era is a bad idea. So let's motivate
> everyone (including Virtuozzo of course) to move to new interfaces and
> avoid problems with all that outdated option inheritance.

libvirt never used 'drive-backup' thus

Reviewed-by: Peter Krempa <pkrempa@redhat.com>