nbd/server: Allow MULTI_CONN for shared writable exports

According to the NBD spec, a server that advertises
NBD_FLAG_CAN_MULTI_CONN promises that multiple client connections will
not see any cache inconsistencies: when properly separated by a single
flush, actions performed by one client will be visible to another
client, regardless of which client did the flush.

We always satisfy these conditions in qemu - even when we support
multiple clients, ALL clients go through a single point of reference
into the block layer, with no local caching.  The effect of one client
is instantly visible to the next client.  Even if our backend were a
network device, we argue that any multi-path caching effects that
would cause inconsistencies in back-to-back actions not seeing the
effect of previous actions would be a bug in that backend, and not the
fault of caching in qemu.  As such, it is safe to unconditionally
advertise CAN_MULTI_CONN for any qemu NBD server situation that
supports parallel clients.

Note, however, that we don't want to advertise CAN_MULTI_CONN when we
know that a second client cannot connect (for historical reasons,
qemu-nbd defaults to a single connection while nbd-server-add and QMP
commands default to unlimited connections; but we already have
existing means to let either style of NBD server creation alter those
defaults).  This is visible by no longer advertising MULTI_CONN for
'qemu-nbd -r' without -e, as in the iotest nbd-qemu-allocation.

The harder part of this patch is setting up an iotest to demonstrate
behavior of multiple NBD clients to a single server.  It might be
possible with parallel qemu-io processes, but I found it easier to do
in python with the help of libnbd, and help from Nir and Vladimir in
writing the test.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Nir Soffer <nsoffer@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <v.sementsov-og@mail.ru>
Message-Id: <20220512004924.417153-3-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/blockdev-nbd.c b/blockdev-nbd.c
index 711e0e72bd..012256bb02 100644
--- a/blockdev-nbd.c
+++ b/blockdev-nbd.c
@@ -44,6 +44,11 @@ bool nbd_server_is_running(void)
     return nbd_server || qemu_nbd_connections >= 0;
 }
 
+int nbd_server_max_connections(void)
+{
+    return nbd_server ? nbd_server->max_connections : qemu_nbd_connections;
+}
+
 static void nbd_blockdev_client_closed(NBDClient *client, bool ignored)
 {
     nbd_client_put(client);