Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Disk integrity in QEMU

[Aurelien Jarno]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 07:26:00AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Aurelien Jarno wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 12:00:41PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>   
>>> So to summarize, I think we should enable O_DSYNC by default to 
>>> ensure  that guest data integrity is not dependent on the host OS, 
>>> and that  practically speaking, cache=off is only useful for very 
>>> specialized  circumstances.  Part of the patch I'll follow up with 
>>> includes changes  to the man page to document all of this for users.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>>     
>>
>> While I agree O_DSYNC should be the defaults, I wonder if we should keep
>> the current behaviour available for those who want it. We can imagine
>> the following options:
>>   cache=off  O_DIRECT
>>   cache=read O_DSYNC         (default)
>>   
>
> Or maybe cache=off, cache=on, cache=wb.  So that the default was  
> cache=on which is write-through, or the user can choose write-back 
> caching.
>
> But that said, I'm concerned that this is far too confusing for users.   
> I don't think anyone is relying on disk write performance when in  
> write-back mode simply because the guest already has a page cache so  
> writes are already being completed instantaneously from the  
> application's perspective.
>

Some of my setups rely on host cache. I am using a swap partition for
some guests in order to increase the available "memory" (some platforms
in qemu are limited to 256MB of RAM), and it that case I don't care 
about data integrity

-- 
  .''`.  Aurelien Jarno             | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
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