libxl: domain save/restore: run in a separate process

libxenctrl expects to be able to simply run the save or restore
operation synchronously.  This won't work well in a process which is
trying to handle multiple domains.

The options are:

 - Block such a whole process (eg, the whole of libvirt) while
   migration completes (or until it fails).

 - Create a thread to run xc_domain_save and xc_domain_restore on.
   This is quite unpalatable.  Multithreaded programming is error
   prone enough without generating threads in libraries, particularly
   if the thread does some very complex operation.

 - Fork and run the operation in the child without execing.  This is
   no good because we would need to negotiate with the caller about
   fds we would inherit (and we might be a very large process).

 - Fork and exec a helper.

Of these options the latter is the most palatable.

Consequently:

 * A new helper program libxl-save-helper (which does both save and
   restore).  It will be installed in /usr/lib/xen/bin.  It does not
   link against libxl, only libxc, and its error handling does not
   need to be very advanced.  It does contain a plumbing through of
   the logging interface into the callback stream.

 * A small ad-hoc protocol between the helper and libxl which allows
   log messages and the libxc callbacks to be passed up and down.
   Protocol doc comment is in libxl_save_helper.c.

 * To avoid a lot of tedium the marshalling boilerplate (stubs for the
   helper and the callback decoder for libxl) is generated with a
   small perl script.

 * Implement new functionality to spawn the helper, monitor its
   output, provide responses, and check on its exit status.

 * The functions libxl__xc_domain_restore_done and
   libxl__xc_domain_save_done now turn out to want be called in the
   same place.  So make their state argument a void* so that the two
   functions are type compatible.

The domain save path still writes the qemu savefile synchronously.
This will need to be fixed in a subsequent patch.

Signed-off-by: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@eu.citrix.com>
Acked-by: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index 24b9846e50..0891d903c4 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -355,6 +355,7 @@ tools/libxl/_*.[ch]
 tools/libxl/testidl
 tools/libxl/testidl.c
 tools/libxl/*.pyc
+tools/libxl/libxl-save-helper
 tools/blktap2/control/tap-ctl
 tools/firmware/etherboot/eb-roms.h
 tools/firmware/etherboot/gpxe-git-snapshot.tar.gz