[Adding NBD mailing list to CC]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 08:43:24AM +0200, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jul 2018, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
> >I was wondering if you have any documentation, or general tips,
> >for writing a new handler? I was thinking of implementing an NBD
> >(Network Block Device) client.
>
> I'm afraid we don't have much docs for that! :-( I suppose mostly
> because it doesn't happen very often.
>
> I think the best way to do it is to take a look at how other
> handlers are written, like perhaps the smb support would be similar
> in style and spirit?

After sending this I worked it out by looking at previous commits of
backends and the code (for SMTP and others). My ongoing difficulty is
understanding the non-blocking model.

> Does NBD actually have a URL syntax defined?

Not officially. Whatever URL syntax defined needs to be able
to specify:

 - hostname + optional port
 - OR Unix domain socket
 - export name

In libguestfs we defined our own URL syntax:

  http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html#a-nbd:-example.com-:port

but it's not completely satisfactory since the export name is a free
text string and does not necessarily begin with a '/' character.

> What's the use case for an application to use this?

This is a very good question. My need is for a C client library for
accessing NBD servers. I don't believe that one exists. There is
plenty of C code for accessing NBD servers (eg. in qemu) but it's
encapsulated in other programs and not easy to separate.

My idea was to use libcurl instead of writing a new library. The
advantage is that curl gives us ‘for free’ a command line tool,
multiple language bindings, and widespread availability.

This is all relatively uncontroversial I hope.

However the complicated bit is that we will eventually need to do more
than just simple read/write of blocks of data. The NBD protocol[1]
supports other features such as:

 - discard blocks
 - efficiently write zeroes
 - negotiate block size
 - list exports
 - query sparseness
 - TLS with certificates or PSK

At some point we'd want to support as many of those features as
possible. Curl supports non-orthogonal features for other protocols
(eg. FTP active port), so I suppose it's not impossible to extend Curl
for NBD, but you may feel that you don't want to do that.

Anyway I think even a basic read/write backend is a worthwhile
addition at the moment.

> Setting up and writing tests for it can probably be a challange.

Can we point the tests to something like nbdkit?

Rich.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/nbd/code/ci/master/tree/doc/proto.md

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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