Re: [Qemu-block] [PATCH v2 7/7] mirror: improve performance of mirroring of empty disk

[Eric Blake]

On 07/11/2016 11:57 PM, Fam Zheng wrote:
> On Mon, 07/11 15:53, John Snow wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 07/07/2016 05:35 AM, Denis V. Lunev wrote:
>>> We should not take into account zero blocks for delay calculations.
>>> They are not read and thus IO throttling is not required. In the
>>> other case VM migration with 16 Tb QCOW2 disk with 4 Gb of data takes
>>> days.
>>

>>
>> What I wonder is if we shouldn't be deterministically reading how much
>> data we are actually shuffling over the pipe and using that for
>> ratelimiting instead of in a higher abstraction layer "guessing" how
>> much data we're going to be sending.
> 
> It's a good question, I wonder if it is possible that block layer can even use
> a fallback of write write_zeroes even write_zeroes_ok is true?

Indeed, if you do an unaligned write, then write_zeroes will fall back
to normal write for at least the head and tail, based on whether the
driver returns -ENOTSUP.

Right now, we are rather loose on what the block layer returns on
successful writes - we guarantee that we don't do short writes (you
either have everything written, or you get a negative result), but
sometimes we return 0 and sometimes we return the length that was
written.  Maybe we could formalize it into the length of data sent over
the wire (return 0 if it was optimized, non-zero if data was sent)? But
that may require a rather large audit of code to implement.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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