guest-sync leaves it as an exercise to the user as to how to reliably
obtain the response to guest-sync if the client had previously read in a
partial response (due qemu-ga previously being restarted mid-"sentence"
due to reboot, forced restart, etc).
qemu-ga handles this situation on its end by having a client precede
their guest-sync request with a 0xFF byte (invalid UTF-8), which
qemu-ga/QEMU JSON parsers will treat as a flush event. Thus we can
reliably flush the qemu-ga parser state in preparation for receiving
the guest-sync request.
guest-sync-delimited provides the same functionality for a client: when
a guest-sync-delimited is issued, qemu-ga will precede it's response
with a 0xFF byte that the client can use as an indicator to flush its
buffer/parser state in preparation for reliably receiving the
guest-sync-delimited response.
It is also useful as an optimization for clients, since, after issuing a
guest-sync-delimited, clients can safely discard all stale data read
from the channel until the 0xFF is found.
More information available on the wiki:
http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/QAPI/GuestAgent#QEMU_Guest_Agent_Protocol
Signed-off-by: Michael Roth <mdroth@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Many of the current RPC implementations are very much POSIX-specific
and require complete re-writes for Windows. There are however a small
set of core guest agent commands that are common to both, and other
commands such as guest-file-* which *may* be portable. So we introduce
commands.c for the latter, and will rename guest-agent-commands.c to
commands-posix.c in a future commit. Windows implementations will go in
commands-win32.c, eventually.
