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2016-03-18qapi: Use anonymous bases in QMP flat unionsEric Blake
Now that the generator supports it, we might as well use an anonymous base rather than breaking out a single-use Base structure, for all three of our current QMP flat unions. Oddly enough, this change does not affect the resulting introspection output (because we already inline the members of a base type into an object, and had no independent use of the base type reachable from a command). The case_whitelist now has to list the name of an implicit type; which is not too bad (consider it a feature if it makes it harder for developers to make the whitelist grow :) Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> Message-Id: <1458254921-17042-16-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
2015-11-17qapi: Document introspection stability considerationsEric Blake
We are not ready (and might never be ready) to declare introspection stable between releases. Clients written to control multiple versions of qemu, and desiring to know whether a particular member is supported for a given command, must be prepared to locate that member in spite of qapi changes that may affect the member's location or type within the overall object, even though such changes did not break QMP wire back-compatibility. Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> Message-Id: <1447264202-19554-1-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
2015-11-10qapi-introspect: Document lack of sortingEric Blake
qapi-code-gen.txt already claims that types, commands, and events share a common namespace; set this in stone by further documenting that our introspection output will never have collisions with the same name tied to more than one meta-type. Our largest QMP enum currently has 125 values, our largest object type has 27 members, and the mean for each is less than 10. These sizes are small enough that the per-element overhead of O(log n) binary searching probably outweighs the speed possible with direct O(n) linear searching (a better algorithm with more overhead will only beat a leaner naive algorithm only as you scale to larger input sizes). Arguably, the overall SchemaInfo array could be sorted by name; there, we currently have 531 entities, large enough for a binary search to be faster than linear. However, remember that we have mutually-recursive types, which means there is no topological ordering that will allow clients to learn all information about that type in a single linear pass; thus clients will want to do random access over the data, and they will probably read the introspection output into a hashtable for O(1) lookup rather than O(log n) binary searching, at which point, pre-sorting our introspection output doesn't help the client. It doesn't help that sorting can be subjective if you introduce locales into the mix (I'm not experienced enough with Python to know for sure, but at least it looks like it defaults to sorting in the C locale even when run under a different locale). And while our current introspection output is deterministic (because we visit entities in a sorted order), we may want to change that order in the future (such as using OrderedDict to stick to .json declaration order). For these reasons, we simply document that clients should not rely on any particular order of items in introspection output. And since it is now a documented part of the contract, we have the freedom to later rearrange output if needed, without worrying about breaking well-written clients. Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> Message-Id: <1446791754-23823-13-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com> [Commit message tweaked] Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
2015-09-21qapi-introspect: Hide type namesMarkus Armbruster
To eliminate the temptation for clients to look up types by name (which are not ABI), replace all type names by meaningless strings. Reduces output of query-schema by 13 out of 85KiB. As a debugging aid, provide option -u to suppress the hiding. Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> Message-Id: <1442401589-24189-27-git-send-email-armbru@redhat.com>
2015-09-21qapi: New QMP command query-qmp-schema for QMP introspectionMarkus Armbruster
qapi/introspect.json defines the introspection schema. It's designed for QMP introspection, but should do for similar uses, such as QGA. The introspection schema does not reflect all the rules and restrictions that apply to QAPI schemata. A valid QAPI schema has an introspection value conforming to the introspection schema, but the converse is not true. Introspection lowers away a number of schema details, and makes implicit things explicit: * The built-in types are declared with their JSON type. All integer types are mapped to 'int', because how many bits we use internally is an implementation detail. It could be pressed into external interface service as very approximate range information, but that's a bad idea. If we need range information, we better do it properly. * Implicit type definitions are made explicit, and given auto-generated names: - Array types, named by appending "List" to the name of their element type, like in generated C. - The enumeration types implicitly defined by simple union types, named by appending "Kind" to the name of their simple union type, like in generated C. - Types that don't occur in generated C. Their names start with ':' so they don't clash with the user's names. * All type references are by name. * The struct and union types are generalized into an object type. * Base types are flattened. * Commands take a single argument and return a single result. Dictionary argument or list result is an implicit type definition. The empty object type is used when a command takes no arguments or produces no results. The argument is always of object type, but the introspection schema doesn't reflect that. The 'gen': false directive is omitted as implementation detail. The 'success-response' directive is omitted as well for now, even though it's not an implementation detail, because it's not used by QMP. * Events carry a single data value. Implicit type definition and empty object type use, just like for commands. The value is of object type, but the introspection schema doesn't reflect that. * Types not used by commands or events are omitted. Indirect use counts as use. * Optional members have a default, which can only be null right now Instead of a mandatory "optional" flag, we have an optional default. No default means mandatory, default null means optional without default value. Non-null is available for optional with default (possible future extension). * Clients should *not* look up types by name, because type names are not ABI. Look up the command or event you're interested in, then follow the references. TODO Should we hide the type names to eliminate the temptation? New generator scripts/qapi-introspect.py computes an introspection value for its input, and generates a C variable holding it. It can generate awfully long lines. Marked TODO. A new test-qmp-input-visitor test case feeds its result for both tests/qapi-schema/qapi-schema-test.json and qapi-schema.json to a QmpInputVisitor to verify it actually conforms to the schema. New QMP command query-qmp-schema takes its return value from that variable. Its reply is some 85KiBytes for me right now. If this turns out to be too much, we have a couple of options: * We can use shorter names in the JSON. Not the QMP style. * Optionally return the sub-schema for commands and events given as arguments. Right now qmp_query_schema() sends the string literal computed by qmp-introspect.py. To compute sub-schema at run time, we'd have to duplicate parts of qapi-introspect.py in C. Unattractive. * Let clients cache the output of query-qmp-schema. It changes only on QEMU upgrades, i.e. rarely. Provide a command query-qmp-schema-hash. Clients can have a cache indexed by hash, and re-query the schema only when they don't have it cached. Even simpler: put the hash in the QMP greeting. Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>