xemu/docs/interop/nbd.txt
Eric Blake ba2d3b3ab2 nbd: Document timeline of various features
It can be useful to figure out which NBD protocol features are
exposed by a server, as well as what features a client will
take advantage of if available, for a given qemu release.  It's
not always precise to base features on version numbers (thanks
to downstream backports), but any documentation is better than
making users search through git logs themselves.

This patch originally stemmed from a request to document that
pristine 3.0 has a known bug where NBD_OPT_LIST_META_CONTEXT
with 0 queries forgot to advertise an available
"qemu:dirty-bitmap" context, but documenting bugs like this (or
the fact that 3.0 also botched NBD_CMD_CACHE) gets to be too
much details, especially since buggy releases will be less
likely connection targets over time.  Instead, I chose to just
remind users to check stable release branches.

Suggested-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <vsementsov@virtuozzo.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20181215135324.152629-3-eblake@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <vsementsov@virtuozzo.com>
2019-01-04 17:41:28 -06:00

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Qemu supports the NBD protocol, and has an internal NBD client (see
block/nbd.c), an internal NBD server (see blockdev-nbd.c), and an
external NBD server tool (see qemu-nbd.c). The common code is placed
in nbd/*.
The NBD protocol is specified here:
https://github.com/NetworkBlockDevice/nbd/blob/master/doc/proto.md
The following paragraphs describe some specific properties of NBD
protocol realization in Qemu.
= Metadata namespaces =
Qemu supports the "base:allocation" metadata context as defined in the
NBD protocol specification, and also defines an additional metadata
namespace "qemu".
== "qemu" namespace ==
The "qemu" namespace currently contains only one type of context,
related to exposing the contents of a dirty bitmap alongside the
associated disk contents. That context has the following form:
qemu:dirty-bitmap:<dirty-bitmap-export-name>
Each dirty-bitmap metadata context defines only one flag for extents
in reply for NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS:
bit 0: NBD_STATE_DIRTY, means that the extent is "dirty"
For NBD_OPT_LIST_META_CONTEXT the following queries are supported
in addition to "qemu:dirty-bitmap:<dirty-bitmap-export-name>":
* "qemu:" - returns list of all available metadata contexts in the
namespace.
* "qemu:dirty-bitmap:" - returns list of all available dirty-bitmap
metadata contexts.
= Features by version =
The following list documents which qemu version first implemented
various features (both as a server exposing the feature, and as a
client taking advantage of the feature when present), to make it
easier to plan for cross-version interoperability. Note that in
several cases, the initial release containing a feature may require
additional patches from the corresponding stable branch to fix bugs in
the operation of that feature.
* 2.6: NBD_OPT_STARTTLS with TLS X.509 Certificates
* 2.8: NBD_CMD_WRITE_ZEROES
* 2.10: NBD_OPT_GO, NBD_INFO_BLOCK
* 2.11: NBD_OPT_STRUCTURED_REPLY
* 2.12: NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS for "base:allocation"
* 3.0: NBD_OPT_STARTTLS with TLS Pre-Shared Keys (PSK),
NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS for "qemu:dirty-bitmap:", NBD_CMD_CACHE