monitor: Suspend monitor instead dropping commands

When a QMP client sends in-band commands more quickly that we can
process them, we can either queue them without limit (QUEUE), drop
commands when the queue is full (DROP), or suspend receiving commands
when the queue is full (SUSPEND).  None of them is ideal:

* QUEUE lets a misbehaving client make QEMU eat memory without bounds.
Not such a hot idea.

* With DROP, the client has to cope with dropped in-band commands.  To
inform the client, we send a COMMAND_DROPPED event then.  The event is
flawed by design in two ways: it's ambiguous (see commit d621cfe0a17),
and it brings back the "eat memory without bounds" problem.

* With SUSPEND, the client has to manage the flow of in-band commands to
keep the monitor available for out-of-band commands.

We currently DROP.  Switch to SUSPEND.

Managing the flow of in-band commands to keep the monitor available for
out-of-band commands isn't really hard: just count the number of
"outstanding" in-band commands (commands sent minus replies received),
and if it exceeds the limit, hold back additional ones until it drops
below the limit again.

Note that we need to be careful pairing the suspend with a resume, or
else the monitor will hang, possibly forever.  And here since we need to
make sure both:

     (1) popping request from the req queue, and
     (2) reading length of the req queue

will be in the same critical section, we let the pop function take the
corresponding queue lock when there is a request, then we release the
lock from the caller.

Reviewed-by: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20181009062718.1914-2-peterx@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/docs/interop/qmp-spec.txt b/docs/interop/qmp-spec.txt
index 8f7da0245d..67e44a8120 100644
--- a/docs/interop/qmp-spec.txt
+++ b/docs/interop/qmp-spec.txt
@@ -130,8 +130,9 @@ to pass "id" with out-of-band commands.  Passing it with all commands
 is recommended for clients that accept capability "oob".
 
 If the client sends in-band commands faster than the server can
-execute them, the server will eventually drop commands to limit the
-queue length.  The sever sends event COMMAND_DROPPED then.
+execute them, the server will stop reading the requests from the QMP
+channel until the request queue length is reduced to an acceptable
+range.
 
 Only a few commands support out-of-band execution.  The ones that do
 have "allow-oob": true in output of query-qmp-schema.