On Wed, Oct 04, 2023 at 02:58:59PM +0200, Hanna Czenczek wrote:
Currently, the vhost-user documentation says that rings are to be
initialized in a disabled state when VHOST_USER_F_PROTOCOL_FEATURES is
negotiated. However, by the time of feature negotiation, all rings have
already been initialized, so it is not entirely clear what this means.
At least the vhost-user-backend Rust crate's implementation interpreted
it to mean that whenever this feature is negotiated, all rings are to
put into a disabled state, which means that every SET_FEATURES call
would disable all rings, effectively halting the device. This is
problematic because the VHOST_F_LOG_ALL feature is also set or cleared
this way, which happens during migration. Doing so should not halt the
device.
Other implementations have interpreted this to mean that the device is
to be initialized with all rings disabled, and a subsequent SET_FEATURES
call that does not set VHOST_USER_F_PROTOCOL_FEATURES will enable all of
them. Here, SET_FEATURES will never disable any ring.
This interpretation does not suffer the problem of unintentionally
halting the device whenever features are set or cleared, so it seems
better and more reasonable.
We can clarify this in the documentation by making it explicit that the
enabled/disabled state is tracked even while the vring is stopped.
Every vring is initialized in a disabled state, and SET_FEATURES without
VHOST_USER_F_PROTOCOL_FEATURES simply becomes one way to enable all
vrings.
Signed-off-by: Hanna Czenczek <hreitz@redhat.com>
OK so I am expecting v5. My advice is to move patch 1 to end of patchset
so we can defer it if we want to.