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+Block replication
+----------------------------------------
+Copyright Fujitsu, Corp. 2015
+Copyright (c) 2015 Intel Corporation
+Copyright (c) 2015 HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD.
+
+This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2 or later.
+See the COPYING file in the top-level directory.
+
+Block replication is used for continuous checkpoints. It is designed
+for COLO (COurse-grain LOck-stepping) where the Secondary VM is running.
+It can also be applied for FT/HA (Fault-tolerance/High Assurance) scenario,
+where the Secondary VM is not running.
+
+This document gives an overview of block replication's design.
+
+== Background ==
+High availability solutions such as micro checkpoint and COLO will do
+consecutive checkpoints. The VM state of Primary VM and Secondary VM is
+identical right after a VM checkpoint, but becomes different as the VM
+executes till the next checkpoint. To support disk contents checkpoint,
+the modified disk contents in the Secondary VM must be buffered, and are
+only dropped at next checkpoint time. To reduce the network transportation
+effort at the time of checkpoint, the disk modification operations of
+Primary disk are asynchronously forwarded to the Secondary node.
+
+== Workflow ==
+The following is the image of block replication workflow:
+
+        +----------------------+            +------------------------+
+        |Primary Write Requests|            |Secondary Write Requests|
+        +----------------------+            +------------------------+
+                  |                                       |
+                  |                                      (4)
+                  |                                       V
+                  |                              /-------------\
+                  |      Copy and Forward        |             |
+                  |---------(1)----------+       | Disk Buffer |
+                  |                      |       |             |
+                  |                     (3)      \-------------/
+                  |                 speculative      ^
+                  |                write through    (2)
+                  |                      |           |
+                  V                      V           |
+           +--------------+           +----------------+
+           | Primary Disk |           | Secondary Disk |
+           +--------------+           +----------------+
+
+    1) Primary write requests will be copied and forwarded to Secondary
+       QEMU.
+    2) Before Primary write requests are written to Secondary disk, the
+       original sector content will be read from Secondary disk and
+       buffered in the Disk buffer, but it will not overwrite the existing
+       sector content (it could be from either "Secondary Write Requests" or
+       previous COW of "Primary Write Requests") in the Disk buffer.
+    3) Primary write requests will be written to Secondary disk.
+    4) Secondary write requests will be buffered in the Disk buffer and it
+       will overwrite the existing sector content in the buffer.
+
+== Architecture ==
+We are going to implement block replication from many basic
+blocks that are already in QEMU.
+
+         virtio-blk       ||
+             ^            ||                            .----------
+             |            ||                            | Secondary
+        1 Quorum          ||                            '----------
+         /      \         ||
+        /        \        ||
+   Primary    2 filter
+     disk         ^                                                             virtio-blk
+                  |                                                                  ^
+                3 NBD  ------->  3 NBD                                               |
+                client    ||     server                                          2 filter
+                          ||        ^                                                ^
+--------.                 ||        |                                                |
+Primary |                 ||  Secondary disk <--------- hidden-disk 5 <--------- active-disk 4
+--------'                 ||        |          backing        ^       backing
+                          ||        |                         |
+                          ||        |                         |
+                          ||        '-------------------------'
+                          ||           drive-backup sync=none 6
+
+1) The disk on the primary is represented by a block device with two
+children, providing replication between a primary disk and the host that
+runs the secondary VM. The read pattern for quorum can be extended to
+make the primary always read from the local disk instead of going through
+NBD.
+
+2) The new block filter (the name is replication) will control the block
+replication.
+
+3) The secondary disk receives writes from the primary VM through QEMU's
+embedded NBD server (speculative write-through).
+
+4) The disk on the secondary is represented by a custom block device
+(called active-disk). It should start as an empty disk, and the format
+should support bdrv_make_empty() and backing file.
+
+5) The hidden-disk is created automatically. It buffers the original content
+that is modified by the primary VM. It should also start as an empty disk,
+and the driver supports bdrv_make_empty() and backing file.
+
+6) The drive-backup job(sync=none) is run to allow hidden-disk to buffer
+any state that would otherwise be lost by the speculative write-through
+of the NBD server into the secondary disk. So before block replication,
+the primary disk and secondary disk should contain the same data.
+
+== Failure Handling ==
+There are 6 internal errors when block replication is running:
+1. I/O error on primary disk
+2. Forwarding primary write requests failed
+3. Backup failed
+4. I/O error on secondary disk
+5. I/O error on active disk
+6. Making active disk or hidden disk empty failed
+In case 1 and 5, we just report the error to the disk layer. In case 2, 3,
+4 and 6, we just report block replication's error to FT/HA manager (which
+decides when to do a new checkpoint, when to do failover).
+There is no internal error when doing failover.
+
+== New block driver interface ==
+We add three block driver interfaces to control block replication:
+a. bdrv_start_replication()
+   Start block replication, called in migration/checkpoint thread.
+   We must call bdrv_start_replication() in secondary QEMU before
+   calling bdrv_start_replication() in primary QEMU. The caller
+   must hold the I/O mutex lock if it is in migration/checkpoint
+   thread.
+b. bdrv_do_checkpoint()
+   This interface is called after all VM state is transferred to
+   Secondary QEMU. The Disk buffer will be dropped in this interface.
+   The caller must hold the I/O mutex lock if it is in migration/checkpoint
+   thread.
+c. bdrv_stop_replication()
+   It is called on failover. We will flush the Disk buffer into
+   Secondary Disk and stop block replication. The vm should be stopped
+   before calling it if you use this API to shutdown the guest, or other
+   things except failover. The caller must hold the I/O mutex lock if it is
+   in migration/checkpoint thread.
+
+== Usage ==
+Primary:
+  -drive if=xxx,driver=quorum,read-pattern=fifo,id=colo1,vote-threshold=1\
+         children.0.file.filename=1.raw,\
+         children.0.driver=raw,\
+
+  Run qmp command in primary qemu:
+    { 'execute': 'human-monitor-command',
+      'arguments': {
+          'command-line': 'drive_add buddy driver=replication,mode=primary,file.driver=nbd,file.host=xxxx,file.port=xxxx,file.export=colo1,node-name=nbd_client1,if=none'
+      }
+    }
+    { 'execute': 'x-blockdev-change',
+      'arguments': {
+          'operation': 'add',
+          'parent': 'colo1',
+          'node': 'nbd_client1'
+      }
+    }
+  Note:
+  1. There should be only one NBD Client for each primary disk.
+  2. host is the secondary physical machine's hostname or IP
+  3. Each disk must have its own export name.
+  4. It is all a single argument to -drive and you should ignore the
+     leading whitespace.
+  5. The qmp command line must be run after running qmp command line in
+     secondary qemu.
+
+Secondary:
+  -drive if=none,driver=raw,file=/dev/null,id=colo1 \
+  -drive if=xxx,driver=replication,mode=secondary,\
+         file.file.filename=active_disk.qcow2,\
+         file.driver=qcow2,\
+         file.backing.file.filename=hidden_disk.qcow2,\
+         file.backing.driver=qcow2,\
+         file.backing.allow-write-backing-file=on,\
+         file.backing.backing.file.filename=1.raw,\
+         file.backing.backing.driver=raw,
+         file.backing.backing.allow-write-backing-file=on,\
+         file.backing.backing.node-name=secondary-disk1
+
+  Then run qmp command in secondary qemu:
+    { 'execute': 'blockdev-remove-medium',
+      'arguments': {
+          'device': 'colo1'
+      }
+    }
+    { 'execute': 'blockdev-insert-medium',
+      'arguments': {
+          'device': 'colo1',
+          'node-name': 'secondary-disk1'
+      }
+    }
+    { 'execute': 'nbd-server-start',
+      'arguments': {
+          'addr': {
+              'type': inet',
+              'data': {
+                  'host': 'xxx',
+                  'port': 'xxx'
+              }
+          }
+      }
+    }
+    { 'execute': 'nbd-server-add',
+      'arguments': {
+          'device': 'colo1',
+          'writable': true
+      }
+    }
+
+  Note:
+  1. The export name in secondary QEMU command line is the secondary
+     disk's id.
+  2. The export name for the same disk must be the same
+  3. The qmp command nbd-server-start and nbd-server-add must be run
+     before running the qmp command migrate on primary QEMU
+  4. Active disk, hidden disk and nbd target's length should be the
+     same.
+  5. It is better to put active disk and hidden disk in ramdisk.
+  6. It is all a single argument to -drive, and you should ignore
+     the leading whitespace.
+
+After Failover:
+Primary:
+  The secondary host is down, so we should run the following qmp command
+  to remove the nbd child from the quorum:
+  { 'execute': 'x-blockdev-change',
+    'arguments': {
+        'operation': 'delete',
+        'parent': 'colo1',
+        'child': 'nbd_client1'
+    }
+  }
+  Note: there is no qmp command to remove the blockdev now
+
+Secondary:
+  The primary host is down, so we should do the following thing:
+  { 'execute': 'nbd-server-stop'
+    'arguments': { }
+  }
+  { 'execute': 'blockdev-remove-medium'
+    'arguments': {
+        'device': 'colo1'
+    }
+  }
+
+TODO:
+1. Continuous block replication
+2. Shared disk
