Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH alt 4/7] block/qcow2: Implement status CB for amend

[Eric Blake]

On 08/01/2014 02:18 PM, Max Reitz wrote:

>>> +        if (status_cb) {
>>> +            status_cb(bs, *visited_l1_entries << (s->l2_bits +
>>> s->cluster_bits),
>>> +                      l1_entries << (s->l2_bits + s->cluster_bits));
>> Shifting is a multiplication so it keep proportionality intact.
>> So do we really need these shifts ?
> 
> As of patch 1, the variables are defined as "offset" and "working_size"
> which I meant to be byte ranges. We could indeed leave the unit for
> BlockDriverAmendStatusCB's parameters undefined (and leave it up to the
> block driver, only specifying that offset / working_size has to be the
> progress ratio), but then we could just as well just give a floating
> point percentage to that function.

As it is, block jobs are already documented as merely exposing
completion percentage, and NOT tied to the size of the underlying block
device.  Your own pending patch is proof of this:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-07/msg00960.html

When doing drive-mirror, we WANT to have the total size grow according
to how many dirty blocks are encountered through each pass, and the
current offset grow in rough proportion to how fast we are converging to
a mirrored state (or even having the percentage go backwards, when we
are diverging from too much I/O pressure, as a sign that some throttling
is needed).  Artificially trying to constrain that progress reporting to
the size in bytes of the block device does not help matters.

> 
> Bytes as a unit seemed safe to me, however, since all of qemu's code
> assumes byte ranges to always fit in int64_t; and the reason I preferred
> them over a percentage is that block jobs use bytes as well.
> 
> A real reason not to use bytes would be that some driver is unable to
> give a "byte" representation of its workload during the amend progress;
> however, this seems unlikely to me (every large workload which should be
> part of the progress report should be somehow representable as bytes).

I don't think we can promise anything more than two relative numbers,
with no bearing on what they are measuring under the hood, so scaling
both numbers just to produce progress output buys nothing.  There may
eventually be a device where we can't report progress in any more
granularity than 0 (still working) or 1 (done).

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

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