Re: [PATCH v3 1/4] block: Add trivial backing_fmt support to qcow, sheepdog, vmdk

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On 3/9/20 10:21 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 06.03.2020 um 23:51 hat Eric Blake geschrieben:
For qcow2 and qed, we want to encourage the use of -F always, as these
formats can suffer from data corruption or security holes if backing
format is probed.  But for other formats, the backing format cannot be
recorded.  Making the user decide on a per-format basis whether to
supply a backing format string is awkward, better is to just blindly
accept a backing format argument even if it is ignored by the
contraints of the format at hand.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@xxxxxxxxxx>

I'm not sure if I agree with this reasoning. Accepting and silently
ignoring -F could give users a false sense of security. If I specify a
-F raw and QEMU later probes qcow2, that would be very surprising.

Do we know what formats qcow, sheepdog, and vmdk expect to probe? I'm wondering if we can compromise by checking that the requested backing image has the specified format, and error if it is not, rather than completely ignoring it - but at the same time, the image formats have no where to record a backing format.

I'm guessing that qcow works with either raw or qcow as backing format (and anything else is odd - a qcow2 backing to a qcow is unusual, and would be better to reject). I'm not sure if sheepdog can be backed by anything but another sheepdog, similarly, I'm not sure if a vmdk can be backed by anything but another vmdk. If so, it should be simple enough to do a v4 of this patch which requires -F to be a known-acceptable probe type for these images.

Still, the point of this patch is that I want to add -F into all the iotests, and without something along the lines of this patch, all of those iotests are broken for these image formats. Patch 2 is a lot harder to write if we have to make our use of -F conditional on the image format in question.

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org




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