This sequence works efficiently if FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE is not supported. Unfortunately, FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE is supported on really modern systems and only for a couple of filesystems. FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE is much more mature.
The sequence of 2 operations FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE and 0 is necessary due to the following reasons: - FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE creates a hole in the file, the file becomes sparse. In order to retain original functionality we must allocate disk space afterwards. This is done using fallocate(0) call - fallocate(0) without preceeding FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE will do nothing if called above already allocated areas of the file, i.e. the content will not be zeroed This should increase the performance a bit for not-so-modern kernels. Signed-off-by: Denis V. Lunev <d...@openvz.org> CC: Max Reitz <mre...@redhat.com> CC: Kevin Wolf <kw...@redhat.com> CC: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefa...@redhat.com> CC: Peter Lieven <p...@kamp.de> CC: Fam Zheng <f...@redhat.com> --- block/raw-posix.c | 15 +++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+) diff --git a/block/raw-posix.c b/block/raw-posix.c index 5a777e7..2e24829 100644 --- a/block/raw-posix.c +++ b/block/raw-posix.c @@ -965,6 +965,21 @@ static ssize_t handle_aiocb_write_zeroes(RawPosixAIOData *aiocb) } #endif +#ifdef CONFIG_FALLOCATE_PUNCH_HOLE + if (s->has_discard) { + int ret = do_fallocate(s->fd, + FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE | FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE, + aiocb->aio_offset, aiocb->aio_nbytes); + if (ret == 0) { + ret = do_fallocate(s->fd, 0, aiocb->aio_offset, aiocb->aio_nbytes); + } + if (ret != -ENOTSUP) { + return ret; + } + s->has_discard = false; + } +#endif + return -ENOTSUP; } -- 1.9.1