The oVirt developers have stated that the real reasons they want
to have qemu reuse existing volumes when creating a snapshot are:
1. the management framework is set up so that creation has to be
done from a central node for proper resource tracking, and having
libvirt and/or qemu create things violates the framework, and
2. qemu defaults to creating snapshots with an absolute path to
the backing file, but oVirt wants to manage a backing chain that
uses just relative names, to allow for easier migration of a chain
across storage locations.
When 0.9.10 added VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_REUSE_EXT (commit
4e9953a4), it only addressed point 1, but libvirt was still using
O_TRUNC which violates point 2. Meanwhile, the new qemu
'transaction' monitor command includes a new optional mode argument
that will force qemu to reuse the metadata of the file it just
opened (with the burden on the caller to have valid metadata there
in the first place). So, this tweaks the meaning of the flag to
cover both points as intended for use by oVirt. It is not strictly
backward-compatible to 0.9.10 behavior, but it can be argued that
the O_TRUNC of 0.9.10 was a bug.
Note that this flag is all-or-nothing, and only selects between
'existing' and the default 'absolute-paths'. A more flexible
approach that would allow per-disk selections, as well as adding
support for the 'no-backing-file' mode, would be possible by
extending the <domainsnapshot> xml to have a per-disk mode, but
until we have a management application expressing a need for that
additional complexity, it is not worth doing.
* src/libvirt.c (virDomainSnapshotCreateXML): Tweak documentation.
* src/qemu/qemu_monitor.h (qemuMonitorDiskSnapshot): Add
parameters.
* src/qemu/qemu_monitor_json.h (qemuMonitorJSONDiskSnapshot):
Likewise.
* src/qemu/qemu_monitor.c (qemuMonitorDiskSnapshot): Pass them
through.
* src/qemu/qemu_monitor_json.c (qemuMonitorJSONDiskSnapshot): Use
new monitor command arguments.
* src/qemu/qemu_driver.c (qemuDomainSnapshotCreateDiskActive)
(qemuDomainSnapshotCreateSingleDiskActive): Adjust callers.
(qemuDomainSnapshotDiskPrepare): Allow qed, modify rules on reuse.
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