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authorAlberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>2018-04-17 15:37:04 +0300
committerMax Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>2018-05-15 16:15:21 +0200
commit52253998ec3e523c9e20ae81e2a6431d8ff733ba (patch)
tree853042f08b7d5f03bb043068d2cb9af6fb613bd7 /docs
parent3c7d14b201ee4eeec2ca259b5a071a4599aa8847 (diff)
qcow2: Give the refcount cache the minimum possible size by default
The L2 and refcount caches have default sizes that can be overridden using the l2-cache-size and refcount-cache-size (an additional parameter named cache-size sets the combined size of both caches). Unless forced by one of the aforementioned parameters, QEMU will set the unspecified sizes so that the L2 cache is 4 times larger than the refcount cache. This is based on the premise that the refcount metadata needs to be only a fourth of the L2 metadata to cover the same amount of disk space. This is incorrect for two reasons: a) The amount of disk covered by an L2 table depends solely on the cluster size, but in the case of a refcount block it depends on the cluster size *and* the width of each refcount entry. The 4/1 ratio is only valid with 16-bit entries (the default). b) When we talk about disk space and L2 tables we are talking about guest space (L2 tables map guest clusters to host clusters), whereas refcount blocks are used for host clusters (including L1/L2 tables and the refcount blocks themselves). On a fully populated (and uncompressed) qcow2 file, image size > virtual size so there are more refcount entries than L2 entries. Problem (a) could be fixed by adjusting the algorithm to take into account the refcount entry width. Problem (b) could be fixed by increasing a bit the refcount cache size to account for the clusters used for qcow2 metadata. However this patch takes a completely different approach and instead of keeping a ratio between both cache sizes it assigns as much as possible to the L2 cache and the remainder to the refcount cache. The reason is that L2 tables are used for every single I/O request from the guest and the effect of increasing the cache is significant and clearly measurable. Refcount blocks are however only used for cluster allocation and internal snapshots and in practice are accessed sequentially in most cases, so the effect of increasing the cache is negligible (even when doing random writes from the guest). So, make the refcount cache as small as possible unless the user explicitly asks for a larger one. Signed-off-by: Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com> Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com> Message-id: 9695182c2eb11b77cb319689a1ebaa4e7c9d6591.1523968389.git.berto@igalia.com Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>
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