[pve-devel] [PATCH v2 qemu-server, manager 00/12] bugzilla #4225 -- improve handling of unavailable ISOs

[Daniel Herzig]

Thanks for this review, this helps a lot on setting up an optimized v3.

Daniel Kral <d.kral at proxmox.com> writes:

>
>> If the parameter is set to 0, the configuration will temporarily
>> changed to use
>> 'none' as file for the cd drive, which allows qemu to start up the machine.
>> The configuration is not changed in this process to avoid unexpected behaviour.
>> Instead a log_warn will be issued.
>> For transition reasons an unset parameter acts like 'required=1'. In
>> this case
>> the startup process will die earlier than currently, if the file is missing or
>> the underlying storage not available.
>
> Hm, I have discussed with Friedrich about this off-list, because I'm
> thinking about "optional" being another name for this flag, since it
> should be required by default for VMs that are not explicitly setting
> this option, i.e. `optional=0`, and if someone sets it explicitly to
> `optional=1` the CDROM can be ignored if it is non-existent.
>
> I think this could also simplify the logic overall, but it depends on
> how we want to present this to users (i.e. the WebGUI).
>
> Are there reasons against this? What do you think?

I have no hard feelings about the naming of this parameter. Indeed,
earlier it already had other names as well already.

I think the only reason why this obviously best-matching label did not
come into closer consideration, is that on parameter definition this
would lead to the possibly confusing construction:

# optional => {
#     [..]
#     optional => 1,
#     [...]

I'm not entirely sure, if this could lead to unexpected side-effects
despite looking funny.

I'm open for different parameter-naming though!

>
>> If however a new VM is created from the WebGUI, the corresponding
>> added checkbox
>> is not checked by default, and the resulting 'required=0' will be written to
>> the configuration.
>
> IMO, I also think that new VMs should be set to `required=0` by
> default, but this change should probably be postponed to 9.0 as it
> would break the current WebGUI "user-API".
>

With the patches applied, this will be handled that way when a new VM gets
created through the GUI (the box is unchecked by default in this case).
So currently it's kind of soft-defaulting to 'required=0' with visual feedback.

But I'm not against rather propagating 'required=1' for 8.x.

To avoid conflicts with automated setup via 'qm create' that possibly
depend on attached ISOs after intial installation nothing will be
set at all on 'headless' actions.

>> To allow for proper testing and building some additions and minor
>> changes
>> where made to to the testing framework as well.
>> Not exactly part of #4225, but related to it, this patch series adds
>> an 'Eject'
>> button to the hardwareview in the WebGUI, which can be used as a convenience
>> shortcut to manually editing the missing ISO file to 'Do not use any media'.
>
> In this case it is better to move unrelated changes into a separate
> patch series, so they can be reviewed on their own :).
>

True :).

>> This series supersedes:
>> https://lore.proxmox.com/pve-devel/20241025150243.134466-1-d.herzig@proxmox.com/
>
> I also just noticed that the repository names are gone from the
> patches - seems like they were accidentally removed when formatting
> the second version of these patches because they were there in v1.

Thanks, good catch, they'll be back in v3!