05.02.2020 17:47, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
05.02.2020 17:26, Eric Blake wrote:
On 2/5/20 3:25 AM, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
3. For qcow2
Hmm. Here, as I understand, than main case is freshly created qcow2,
which is fully-unallocated. To understand that it is empty, we
need only to check all L1 entries. And for empty L1 table it is fast.
So we don't need any qcow2 format improvement to check it.
Ah yes, I forget about preallocated case. Hmm. For preallocated clusters,
we have zero bits in L2 entries. And with them, we even don't need
preallocated to be filled by zeros, as we never read them (but just return
zeros on read)..
Scanning all L2 entries is O(n), while an autoclear bit properly maintained is
O(1).
Then, may be we want similar flag for L1 entry (this will enable large
fast write-zero). And may be we want flag which marks the whole image
as read-zero (it's your flag). So, now I think, my previous idea
of "all allocated is zero" is worse. As for fully-preallocated images
we are sure that all clusters are allocated, and it is more native to
have flags similar to ZERO bit in L2 entry.
Right now, we don't have any L1 entry flags. Adding one would require adding
an incompatible feature flag (if older qemu would choke to see unexpected flags
in an L1 entry), or at best an autoclear feature flag (if the autoclear bit
gets cleared because an older qemu opened the image and couldn't maintain L1
entry flags correctly, then newer qemu knows it cannot trust those L1 entry
flags). But as soon as you are talking about adding a feature bit, then why
add one that still requires O(n) traversal to check (true, the 'n' in an O(n)
traversal of L1 tables is much smaller than the 'n' in an O(n) traversal of L2
tables), when you can instead just add an O(1) autoclear bit that maintains
all_zero status for the image as a whole?
My suggestion about L1 entry flag is side thing, I understand difference
between O(n) and O(1) :) Still additional L1 entry will help to make efficient
large block-status and write-zero requests.
And I agree that we need top level flag.. I just try to say, that it seems good
to make it similar with existing L2 flag. But yes, it would be incomaptible
change, as it marks all clusters as ZERO, and older Qemu can't understand it
and may treat all clusters as unallocated.
Still, how long is this O(n) ? We load the whole L1 into memory anyway. For
example, 16Tb disk with 64K granularity, we'll have 32768 L1 entries. Will we
get sensible performance benefit with an extension? I doubt in it now. And
anyway, if we have an extension, we should fallback to this O(n) if we don't
have the flag set.
So, I think the flag is beneficial only for preallocated images.
Hmm. and for such images, if we want, we can define this flag as 'all clusters
are allocated zeroes', if we want. Which will prove that image reads as zero
independently of any backing relations.
--
Best regards,
Vladimir
