In the past, generic SCSI commands issued from a guest to a virtio
disk were always passed through to the underlying disk by qemu, and
the kernel would also pass them on.
As a result of CVE-2011-4127 (see:
http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2011/q4/536), qemu now honors its
scsi=on|off device option for virtio-blk-pci (which enables/disables
passthrough of generic SCSI commands), and the kernel will only allow
the commands for physical devices (not for partitions or logical
volumes). The default behavior of qemu is still to allow sending
generic SCSI commands to physical disks that are presented to a guest
as virtio-blk-pci devices, but libvirt prefers to disable those
commands in the standard virtio block devices, enabling it only when
specifically requested (hopefully indicating that the requester
understands what they're asking for). For this purpose, a new libvirt
disk device type (device='lun') has been created.
device='lun' is identical to the default device='disk', except that:
1) It is only allowed if bus='virtio', type='block', and the qemu
version is "new enough" to support it ("new enough" == qemu 0.11 or
better), otherwise the domain will fail to start and a
CONFIG_UNSUPPORTED error will be logged).
2) The option "scsi=on" will be added to the -device arg to allow
SG_IO commands (if device !='lun', "scsi=off" will be added to the
-device arg so that SG_IO commands are specifically forbidden).
Guests which continue to use disk device='disk' (the default) will no
longer be able to use SG_IO commands on the disk; those that have
their disk device changed to device='lun' will still be able to use SG_IO
commands.
*docs/formatdomain.html.in - document the new device attribute value.
*docs/schemas/domaincommon.rng - allow it in the RNG
*tests/* - update the args of several existing tests to add scsi=off, and
add one new test that will test scsi=on.
*src/conf/domain_conf.c - update domain XML parser and formatter
*src/qemu/qemu_(command|driver|hotplug).c - treat
VIR_DOMAIN_DISK_DEVICE_LUN *almost* identically to
VIR_DOMAIN_DISK_DEVICE_DISK, except as indicated above.
Note that no support for this new device value was added to any
hypervisor drivers other than qemu, because it's unclear what it might
mean (if anything) to those drivers.
Prefer bootindex=N option for -device over the old way -boot ORDER
possibly accompanied with boot=on option for -drive. This gives us full
control over which device will actually be used for booting guest OS.
Moreover, if qemu doesn't support boot=on, this is the only way to boot
of certain disks in some configurations (such as virtio disks when used
together IDE disks) without transforming domain XML to use per device
boot elements.
