Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] specs/qcow2: Fix documentation of the compressed cluster descriptor

[Eric Blake]

On 02/20/2018 04:03 PM, Eric Blake wrote:

> > boundary. Technically, it might be possible, but qemu does NOT do that 
> > (again, looking at qcow2_alloc_bytes() - we loop if free_in_cluster < 
> > size) - so we may want to be explicit about this point to prevent 
> > OTHER implementations from creating a compressed cluster that crosses 
> > host cluster boundaries (right now, I can't see 
> > qcow2_decompress_cluster() validating it, though - YIKES).

Aha, I see where I went wrong.

> That said, a simple patch to try this:

> triggers failures in iotests 122:
>
> --- /home/eblake/qemu/tests/qemu-iotests/122.out    2017-10-06 
> 13:45:25.559279136 -0500
> +++ /home/eblake/qemu/tests/qemu-iotests/122.out.bad    2018-02-20 
> 15:54:29.890221575 -0600
> @@ -117,8 +117,8 @@
>   convert -c -S 0:
>   read 3145728/3145728 bytes at offset 0
>   3 MiB, X ops; XX:XX:XX.X (XXX YYY/sec and XXX ops/sec)
> -read 63963136/63963136 bytes at offset 3145728
> -61 MiB, X ops; XX:XX:XX.X (XXX YYY/sec and XXX ops/sec)
> +qcow2: Marking image as corrupt: Compressed cluster at 0x5ffd2 crosses 
> host cluster boundary; further corruption events will be suppressed
> +read failed: Input/output error
>   [{ "start": 0, "length": 67108864, "depth": 0, "zero": false, "data": 
> true}]
>
> so it looks like I'm reading qcow2_alloc_bytes() wrong and that we CAN 
> have a compressed cluster that crosses host cluster boundaries?

We DO allow crossing sector boundaries, IF the newly allocated cluster 
is contiguous to the cluster that has the unused tail that we are 
starting in.  Good, because that's less wasteful of the image (suppose 
every compressed cluster got 49% reduction in size - since each one 
requires 51% of a cluster, not allowing cluster crossing would require a 
full cluster each, rather than the expected ~49% reduction in overall 
image size if we are good at contiguous allocations).

> > So if I may suggest:
> >
> >     x+1 - 61:    Number of additional 512-byte sectors used for the
> >                  compressed data, beyond the sector containing the
> >                  offset in the previous field.  These sectors must fit
> >                  within the same host cluster.
>
> This sentence needs tweaking to match reality, given that my simple 
> patch to flag cross-sector hosts triggered (or I need to figure out what 
> was wrong with my patch).

So change that sentence to:  As needed, these additional sectors may 
reside in the next contiguous host cluster.

> >   Note that the compressed
> >                  data does not necessarily occupy all of the bytes in
> >                  the final sector; rather, decompression stops when it
> >                  has produced a cluster of data.  Another compressed
> >                  cluster may map to the tail of the final sector used
> >                  by this compressed cluster.

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