Re: Virtinst and blktap

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Cole Robinson wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
Cole Robinson wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
Chris Lalancette wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
I had a user question about how they can specify blktap for Xen in Cobbler instead of the file driver (for performance reasons) ... well, it turns out they can't (yet).

Under what conditions can we use blktap, and is that advisable? (I had thought this might work like virtio, in which case, passing in the os version uses a table, but it seems this may only actually depend on the host and has no guest limitations?)
That's exactly right.  It's a property of how the host OS accesses the disk on
behalf of the domain, not of how the disk is presented to the domain.  In fact,
for Xen PV domains, you should *only* ever use blktap (i.e. tap:aio:); direct
file: access can corrupt your guest domains on host crash.  The situation with
FV domains is more complicated, but there, you can use file:, since it properly
does flushing.

It looks like from the virtinst code I could just call utils.is_blktap_capable() from my libvirt-using application and if so, then pass the driver=DRIVER_TAP options to virstinst.

Good idea?  Bad idea?
The only reasonable default for Xen PV domains, in my opinion.

Thanks.

FWIW the default behavior of python-virtinst seems to be to /not/ use blktap, and should probably be fixed then if there's a potential corruption problem.

I haven't tested command line virt-install to see what it does.

That default is actually set in virt-install and virt-manager, but
probably should have been moved into the virtinst library a long time ago.

- COle
Yeah, I can't keep up very well when stuff doesn't happen there :)

Should I make the fix in koan also or do you want to move it?

--Michael


I'll take a look at moving it into the library, but for back compat it
wouldn't hurt to set the default in koan. The virt-install code is:

http://hg.et.redhat.com/cgi-bin/hg-virt.cgi/applications/virtinst--devel/file/5d6dc8af58b5/virt-install#l209

- Cole

Excellent, will do.


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