Especially when O_DIRECT is used with image files so that the page cache
indirection can't cause a merge of allocating requests, the file will
fragment on the file system layer, with a potentially very small
fragment size (this depends on the requests the guest sent).
On Linux, fragmentation can be reduced by setting an extent size hint
when creating the file (at least on XFS, it can't be set any more after
the first extent has been allocated), basically giving raw files a
"cluster size" for allocation.
This adds a create option to set the extent size hint, and changes the
default from not setting a hint to setting it to 1 MB. The main reason
why qcow2 defaults to smaller cluster sizes is that COW becomes more
expensive, which is not an issue with raw files, so we can choose a
larger size. The tradeoff here is only potentially wasted disk space.
For qcow2 (or other image formats) over file-posix, the advantage should
even be greater because they grow sequentially without leaving holes, so
there won't be wasted space. Setting even larger extent size hints for
such images may make sense. This can be done with the new option, but
let's keep the default conservative for now.
The effect is very visible with a test that intentionally creates a
badly fragmented file with qemu-img bench (the time difference while
creating the file is already remarkable) and then looks at the number of
extents and the time a simple "qemu-img map" takes.
Without an extent size hint:
$ ./qemu-img create -f raw -o extent_size_hint=0 ~/tmp/test.raw 10G
Formatting '/home/kwolf/tmp/test.raw', fmt=raw size=10737418240 extent_size_hint=0
$ ./qemu-img bench -f raw -t none -n -w ~/tmp/test.raw -c 1000000 -S 8192 -o 0
Sending 1000000 write requests, 4096 bytes each, 64 in parallel (starting at offset 0, step size 8192)
Run completed in 25.848 seconds.
$ ./qemu-img bench -f raw -t none -n -w ~/tmp/test.raw -c 1000000 -S 8192 -o 4096
Sending 1000000 write requests, 4096 bytes each, 64 in parallel (starting at offset 4096, step size 8192)
Run completed in 19.616 seconds.
$ filefrag ~/tmp/test.raw
/home/kwolf/tmp/test.raw: 2000000 extents found
$ time ./qemu-img map ~/tmp/test.raw
Offset Length Mapped to File
0 0x1e8480000 0 /home/kwolf/tmp/test.raw
real 0m1,279s
user 0m0,043s
sys 0m1,226s
With the new default extent size hint of 1 MB:
$ ./qemu-img create -f raw -o extent_size_hint=1M ~/tmp/test.raw 10G
Formatting '/home/kwolf/tmp/test.raw', fmt=raw size=10737418240 extent_size_hint=1048576
$ ./qemu-img bench -f raw -t none -n -w ~/tmp/test.raw -c 1000000 -S 8192 -o 0
Sending 1000000 write requests, 4096 bytes each, 64 in parallel (starting at offset 0, step size 8192)
Run completed in 11.833 seconds.
$ ./qemu-img bench -f raw -t none -n -w ~/tmp/test.raw -c 1000000 -S 8192 -o 4096
Sending 1000000 write requests, 4096 bytes each, 64 in parallel (starting at offset 4096, step size 8192)
Run completed in 10.155 seconds.
$ filefrag ~/tmp/test.raw
/home/kwolf/tmp/test.raw: 178 extents found
$ time ./qemu-img map ~/tmp/test.raw
Offset Length Mapped to File
0 0x1e8480000 0 /home/kwolf/tmp/test.raw
real 0m0,061s
user 0m0,040s
sys 0m0,014s
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20200707142329.48303-1-kwolf@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
=== This is the QEMU I/O test suite ===
* Intro
This package contains a simple test suite for the I/O layer of qemu.
It does not require a guest, but only the qemu, qemu-img and qemu-io
binaries. This does limit it to exercise the low-level I/O path only
but no actual block drivers like ide, scsi or virtio.
* Usage
Just run ./check to run all tests for the raw image format, or ./check
-qcow2 to test the qcow2 image format. The output of ./check -h explains
additional options to test further image formats or I/O methods.
* Feedback and patches
Please send improvements to the test suite, general feedback or just
reports of failing tests cases to qemu-devel@nongnu.org with a CC:
to qemu-block@nongnu.org.
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