qemu-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 00/17] Add qemu-img subcommand to dump file m


From: Peter Lieven
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 00/17] Add qemu-img subcommand to dump file metadata
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 10:17:18 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130623 Thunderbird/17.0.7

On 16.07.2013 18:29, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
This series adds a subcommand to "map" that can dump file metadata.
Metadata that is dumped includes:

- whether blocks are allocated in bs->file and, if so, where

- whether blocks are zero

- whether data is read from bs or bs->backing_hd

Metadata is dumped for an entire chain of images.  One example usage is
(for non-compressed, non-encrypted images) to transform the metadata
into a Linux device-mapper setup, and make a qcow2 image available (for
read only) as a block device.  Another possible usage is to determine
the used areas of a file, and convert it in place to another format.
Alternatively, the richer data can be used by block jobs to quickly
determine if a block is zero without reading it.

The patches implement a new operation, bdrv_co_get_block_status, that
supersedes bdrv_co_is_allocated.  The bdrv_is_allocated API is still
available of course, and implemented on top of the new operation.

Patches 1-3 touch cow, which uses bdrv_co_is_allocated during its reads
and writes.  I optimized it a bit because it was unbearably slow during
testing.  With these patches (also tested with blkverify), booting of
a cow guest image is not particularly slow.

Patches 4 to 6 clean up the bdrv_is_allocated and bdrv_is_allocated_above
implementation, eliminating some code duplication.

Patches 7 and 8 tweak bdrv_has_zero_init and its usage in qemu-img in
a way that helps when implementing the new API.

Patches 9 to 11 implement bdrv_get_block_status and change the formats
to report all the available information.

Patch 12 adds the "map" subcommand to qemu-img.

Finally, patches 13 to 17 tweak the implementation to extract more
information from protocols, and combine this information with format
metadata whenever possible.

maybe i have missed it in your patches, but would it be also possible to issue
DISCARDZEROES ioctl on linux to return zero status for block devices also?

Peter



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]