Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu-img create doesn't always replace the existing file

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 03:05:24PM +0100, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> [ Cc: qemu-block ]
> 
> Am 08.11.2016 um 11:58 hat Richard W.M. Jones geschrieben:
> > When using 'qemu-img create', if the file being created already
> > exists, then qemu-img tries to read it first.  This has some
> > unexpected effects:
> > 
> > 
> > $ rm test.qcow2 
> > $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o compat=1.1,preallocation=off test.qcow2 1G
> > Formatting 'test.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 compat=1.1 
> > encryption=off cluster_size=65536 preallocation=off lazy_refcounts=off 
> > refcount_bits=16
> > $ du -sh test.qcow2 
> > 196K test.qcow2
> > 
> > 
> > $ rm test.qcow2 
> > $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o compat=1.1,preallocation=falloc test.qcow2 1G
> > Formatting 'test.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 compat=1.1 
> > encryption=off cluster_size=65536 preallocation=falloc lazy_refcounts=off 
> > refcount_bits=16
> > $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o compat=1.1,preallocation=off test.qcow2 1G
> > Formatting 'test.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 compat=1.1 
> > encryption=off cluster_size=65536 preallocation=off lazy_refcounts=off 
> > refcount_bits=16
> > $ du -sh test.qcow2 
> > 256K test.qcow2            # would expect this to be the same as above
> 
> For me it's actually even more:
> 
> $ du -h /tmp/test.qcow2 
> 448K    /tmp/test.qcow2
> 
> However...
> 
> $ ls -lh /tmp/test.qcow2 
> -rw-r--r--. 1 kwolf kwolf 193K  8. Nov 15:00 /tmp/test.qcow2
> 
> So qemu-img can't be at fault, the file has the same size as always.
> 
> Are you using XFS? In my case I would have guessed that it's probably
> some preallocation thing that XFS does internally. We've seen this
> before that 'du' shows (sometimes by far) larger values than the file
> size on XFS. That space is reclaimed later, though.

Yes I am, and indeed this looks like a filesystem artifact and not
a problem with qemu-img.

Thanks,

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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