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, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/block/nbd.h b/include/block/nbd.h
index c5a29ce1c6..c74b7a9d2e 100644
--- a/include/block/nbd.h
+++ b/include/block/nbd.h
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 /*
- *  Copyright (C) 2016-2020 Red Hat, Inc.
+ *  Copyright (C) 2016-2022 Red Hat, Inc.
  *  Copyright (C) 2005  Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
  *
  *  Network Block Device
@@ -346,6 +346,7 @@ void nbd_client_put(NBDClient *client);
 
 void nbd_server_is_qemu_nbd(int max_connections);
 bool nbd_server_is_running(void);
+int nbd_server_max_connections(void);
 void nbd_server_start(SocketAddress *addr, const char *tls_creds,
                       const char *tls_authz, uint32_t max_connections,
                       Error **errp);