qcow2 calls bdrv_flush() after performing COW in order to ensure that the
L2 table change is never written before the copy is safe on disk. Now that the
L2 table is cached, we can wait with flushing until we write out the next L2
table.
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
This adds some new cache functions to qcow2 which can be used for caching
refcount blocks and L2 tables. When used with cache=writethrough they work
like the old caching code which is spread all over qcow2, so for this case we
have merely a cleanup.
The interesting case is with writeback caching (this includes cache=none) where
data isn't written to disk immediately but only kept in cache initially. This
leads to some form of metadata write batching which avoids the current "write
to refcount block, flush, write to L2 table" pattern for each single request
when a lot of cluster allocations happen. Instead, cache entries are only
written out if its required to maintain the right order. In the pure cluster
allocation case this means that all metadata updates for requests are done in
memory initially and on sync, first the refcount blocks are written to disk,
then fsync, then L2 tables.
This improves performance of scenarios with lots of cluster allocations
noticably (e.g. installation or after taking a snapshot).
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
