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Re: [Qemu-block] [PATCH V4 01/10] specs/qcow2: add compress format exten


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: [Qemu-block] [PATCH V4 01/10] specs/qcow2: add compress format extension
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2017 10:52:19 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.2.1

On 07/20/2017 09:20 AM, Peter Lieven wrote:
> Signed-off-by: Peter Lieven <address@hidden>
> ---
>  docs/interop/qcow2.txt | 43 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
>  1 file changed, 42 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 

> +== Compress format extension ==
> +
> +The compress format extension is an optional header extension. It provides
> +the ability to specify the compress algorithm and compress parameters
> +that are used for compressed clusters. This new header MUST be present if
> +the incompatible-feature bit "compress format bit" is set and MUST be absent
> +otherwise.
> +
> +Note: Ommitting the incompatible "Compress format bit" results in the usage

s/Ommitting/Omitting/

> +of zlib compression with default compression level (default before QEMU 
> 2.10).
> +However, this old default has a smaller compression window size which 
> results in
> +lower compression ratio and slightly worse compression speed compared to
> +explicity specifying zlib compression with default compression level in the

s/explicity/explicitly/

> +compress format extension.

If window size affects decompression, then we absolutely must specify
what window size is in use, both for the old-style compression (bug that
we haven't mentioned window size in the past), and for the new-style.
That is, if you have to tell zlib at decompression time what size window
was used at compression, then our choices for window size should be
mentioned in this spec.  Furthermore, if window size matters, it sounds
like it should be a zlib-specific tunable.  I really would like to be
able to document that having the extension header present with
parameters XYZ is the same as omitting the extension header (but that is
only doable if window size is a tunable parameter).

I haven't yet checked your code implementation to see where you are
setting window sizes, to know if window size is something that should be
a tunable in the file format.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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