Re: [Libguestfs] nbdkit problem with cache/cow and unaligned sizes

Right now, the cache and cow filters always round up requests to blksize boundaries (blksize for cache is dynamically determined at connection start, for cow is fixed as BLKSIZE). Which is fine for the bulk of the underlying file, but can cause problems when reading past EOF for a partial tail of an underlying plugin. We aren't validating that filter calls to next_ops are within bounds; and even if the plugin tolerates the past-EOF read, we aren't guaranteeing that the client will always read 0 bytes in the past-EOF tail. Several ideas of fixing it, each with some drawbacks: + in cache/cow_get_size(), truncate the plugin's size down to blksize prior to calling blk_set_size() (renders the plugin's tail unusable)

+ reject serving images that aren't already aligned to blksize (avoids missing bytes or worrying about past-EOF slop, but can be mean, unless...) + document that for unaligned images, you can use --filter=cache --filter=truncate round-up=BLKSIZE, to let the truncate filter take care of our slop (doesn't play nicely with the fact that we can only use a filter once, if a user wants to also use --filter=truncate prior to --filter=cache)

+ rewrite both the cache/blk.c and cow/blk.c handlers to pay more attention to unaligned EOF (code duplication) + teach filters.c next_ops to auto-cap filter requests into valid ranges prior to calling into the next layer (trickier than it looks, especially if we later add NBD resize extension support) + others?