One big downside of using the pipe to transfer the data is that
we can really transfer just bare data. No metadata can be carried
through unless some formatted messages are introduced. That would
be quite painful to achieve so let's use a message queue. It's
fairly easy to exchange info between threads now that iohelper is
no longer used.
The reason why we cannot use the FD for plain files directly is
that despite us setting noblock flag on the FD, any
read()/write() blocks regardless (which is a show stopper since
those parts of the code are run from the event loop) and poll()
reports such FD as always readable/writable - even though the
subsequent operation might block.
The pipe is still not gone though. It is used to signal the event
loop that an event occurred (e.g. data is available for reading
in the queue, or vice versa).
Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
Currently we use iohelper for virFDStream implementation. This is
because UNIX I/O can lie sometimes: even though a FD for a
file/block device is set as unblocking, actual read()/write() can
block. To avoid this, a pipe is created and one end is kept for
read/write while the other is handed over to iohelper to
write/read the data for us. Thus it's iohelper which gets blocked
and not our event loop.
This approach has two problems:
1) we are spawning a new process.
2) any exchange of information between daemon and iohelper can be
done only through the pipe.
Therefore, iohelper is replaced with an implementation in thread
which is created just for the stream lifetime. The data are still
transferred through pipe (for now), but both problems described
above are solved.
Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: John Ferlan <jferlan@redhat.com>
While this is no functional change, it makes the code look a bit
nicer. Moreover, it prepares ground for future work.
Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: John Ferlan <jferlan@redhat.com>
There is really no reason why we should have to have 'struct'
everywhere.
Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: John Ferlan <jferlan@redhat.com>
There is no reason for it not to be in the utils, all global symbols
under that file already have prefix vir* and there is no reason for it
to be part of DRIVER_SOURCES because that is just a leftover from
older days (pre-driver modules era, I believe).
Signed-off-by: Martin Kletzander <mkletzan@redhat.com>
