[Libvir] Asynchronous notifications of domain start/stop

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I had some private discussions with a developer who wants to start using 
libvirt, but requires asynch notifications of domain start/stop (and 
other stuff, but this will do for the moment).  Right now he's using 
XenStore watches.  The alternative of polling didn't look very appealing 
for him.

A rough API for this might look like this:

typedef int virEventHandle;

/* Register a callback to catch domain start events. */
virEventHandle virEventDomainStart
     (virConnectPtr,
      void (*f) (virConnectPtr, int domid));

/* Register a callback to catch domain stop events. */
virEventHandle virEventDomainStop
     (virConnectPtr,
      void (*f) (virConnectPtr, int domid));

/* Unregister any type of callback. */
int virEventCancel (virConnectPtr, virEventHandle handle);


Implementation
--------------

In the Xen case, we can use XenStore watches[1].  Callbacks from 
XenStore can be translated directly into event callbacks.

In the qemu case, the daemon knows when the qemu instances that it 
manages come and go.

In the qemu/remote case, asynch notifications are nominally supported by 
the protocol, but I haven't really looked at all the implications. 
Seems like we'd need to use MSG_OOB to signal the client process, and 
translate the SIGURG signal received into a callback.  This is all 
tricky and Unix-specific though so if you have any better ideas ...  We 
would also need to avoid mixing ordinary request/response with the 
notifications, which OOB takes care of.

Rich.

[1] http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenBusDriver

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