Re: qom device lifecycle interaction with hotplug/hotunplug ?

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2019 at 10:18:24AM +0100, Jens Freimann wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2019 at 06:40:04PM -0300, Eduardo Habkost wrote:
> > +jfreimann, +mst
> > 
> > On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 11:10:19AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > > On Fri, 29 Nov 2019 at 20:05, Eduardo Habkost <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > > So, to summarize the current issues:
> > > >
> > > > 1) realize triggers a plug operation implicitly.
> > > > 2) unplug triggers unrealize implicitly.
> > > >
> > > > Do you expect to see use cases that will require us to implement
> > > > realize-without-plug?
> > > 
> > > I don't think so, but only because of the oddity that
> > > we put lots of devices on the 'sysbus' and claim that
> > > that's plugging them into the bus. The common case of
> > > 'realize' is where one device (say an SoC) has a bunch of child
> > > devices (like UARTs); the SoC's realize method realizes its child
> > > devices. Those devices all end up plugged into the 'sysbus'
> > > but there's no actual bus there, it's fictional and about
> > > the only thing it matters for is reset propagation (which
> > > we don't model right either). A few devices don't live on
> > > buses at all.
> > 
> > That's my impression as well.
> > 
> > > 
> > > > Similarly, do you expect use cases that will require us to
> > > > implement unplug-without-unrealize?
> > > 
> > > I don't know enough about hotplug to answer this one:
> > > it's essentially what I'm hoping you'd be able to answer.
> > > I vaguely had in mind that eg the user might be able to
> > > create a 'disk' object, plug it into a SCSI bus, then
> > > unplug it from the bus without the disk and all its data
> > > evaporating, and maybe plug it back into the SCSI
> > > bus (or some other SCSI bus) later ? But I don't know
> > > anything about how we expose that kind of thing to the
> > > user via QMP/HMP.
> > 
> > This ability isn't exposed to the user at all.  Our existing
> > interfaces are -device, device_add and device_del.
> > 
> > We do have something new that sounds suspiciously similar to
> > "unplugged but not unrealized", though: the new hidden device
> > API, added by commit f3a850565693 ("qdev/qbus: add hidden device
> > support").
> > 
> > Jens, Michael, what exactly is the difference between a "hidden"
> > device and a "unplugged" device?
> 
> "hidden" the way we use it for virtio-net failover is actually unplugged. But 
> it
> doesn't have to be that way. You can register a function that decides
> if the device should be hidden, i.e. plugged now, or do something else
> with it (in the virtio-net failover case we just save everything we
> need to plug the device later).
> 
> We did introduce a "unplugged but not unrealized" function too as part
> of the failover feature. See "a99c4da9fc pci: mark devices partially
> unplugged"
> 
> This was needed so we would be able to re-plug the device in case a
> migration failed and we need to hotplug the primary device back to the
> guest. To avoid the risk of not getting the resources the device needs
> we don't unrealize but just trigger the unplug from the guest OS.

Thanks for the explanation.  Let me confirm if I understand the
purpose of the new mechanisms: should_be_hidden is a mechanism
for implementing realize-without-plug.  partially_hotplugged is a
mechanism for implementing unplug-without-unrealize.  Is that
correct?

-- 
Eduardo