When processing vectored guest requests that are not aligned to the
storage request alignment, we pad them by adding head and/or tail
buffers for a read-modify-write cycle.
The guest can submit I/O vectors up to IOV_MAX (1024) in length, but
with this padding, the vector can exceed that limit. As of
4c002cef0e9abe7135d7916c51abce47f7fc1ee2 ("util/iov: make
qemu_iovec_init_extended() honest"), we refuse to pad vectors beyond the
limit, instead returning an error to the guest.
To the guest, this appears as a random I/O error. We should not return
an I/O error to the guest when it issued a perfectly valid request.
Before 4c002cef0e9abe7135d7916c51abce47f7fc1ee2, we just made the vector
longer than IOV_MAX, which generally seems to work (because the guest
assumes a smaller alignment than we really have, file-posix's
raw_co_prw() will generally see bdrv_qiov_is_aligned() return false, and
so emulate the request, so that the IOV_MAX does not matter). However,
that does not seem exactly great.