From 92196b2f5664d5defa778b1b24df56e2239b5e93 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Stefan Hajnoczi Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 12:26:52 +0100 Subject: block: add cache=directsync parameter to -drive This patch adds -drive cache=directsync for O_DIRECT | O_SYNC host file I/O with no disk write cache presented to the guest. This mode is useful when guests may not be sending flushes when appropriate and therefore leave data at risk in case of power failure. When cache=directsync is used, write operations are only completed to the guest when data is safely on disk. This new mode is like cache=writethrough but it bypasses the host page cache. Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf --- qemu-options.hx | 8 ++++++-- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) (limited to 'qemu-options.hx') diff --git a/qemu-options.hx b/qemu-options.hx index d86815dc04..35d95d1d89 100644 --- a/qemu-options.hx +++ b/qemu-options.hx @@ -133,7 +133,7 @@ ETEXI DEF("drive", HAS_ARG, QEMU_OPTION_drive, "-drive [file=file][,if=type][,bus=n][,unit=m][,media=d][,index=i]\n" " [,cyls=c,heads=h,secs=s[,trans=t]][,snapshot=on|off]\n" - " [,cache=writethrough|writeback|none|unsafe][,format=f]\n" + " [,cache=writethrough|writeback|none|directsync|unsafe][,format=f]\n" " [,serial=s][,addr=A][,id=name][,aio=threads|native]\n" " [,readonly=on|off]\n" " use 'file' as a drive image\n", QEMU_ARCH_ALL) @@ -164,7 +164,7 @@ These options have the same definition as they have in @option{-hdachs}. @item snapshot=@var{snapshot} @var{snapshot} is "on" or "off" and allows to enable snapshot for given drive (see @option{-snapshot}). @item cache=@var{cache} -@var{cache} is "none", "writeback", "unsafe", or "writethrough" and controls how the host cache is used to access block data. +@var{cache} is "none", "writeback", "unsafe", "directsync" or "writethrough" and controls how the host cache is used to access block data. @item aio=@var{aio} @var{aio} is "threads", or "native" and selects between pthread based disk I/O and native Linux AIO. @item format=@var{format} @@ -199,6 +199,10 @@ The host page cache can be avoided entirely with @option{cache=none}. This will attempt to do disk IO directly to the guests memory. QEMU may still perform an internal copy of the data. +The host page cache can be avoided while only sending write notifications to +the guest when the data has been reported as written by the storage subsystem +using @option{cache=directsync}. + Some block drivers perform badly with @option{cache=writethrough}, most notably, qcow2. If performance is more important than correctness, @option{cache=writeback} should be used with qcow2. -- cgit v1.2.3