Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 4/6] dirty-bitmaps: clean-up bitmaps loading and migration logic

[Denis V. Lunev]

On 08/01/2018 09:56 PM, John Snow wrote:
>
> On 08/01/2018 02:42 PM, Denis V. Lunev wrote:
>> On 08/01/2018 08:40 PM, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
>>> * John Snow (address@hidden) wrote:
>>>> On 08/01/2018 06:20 AM, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
>>>>> * John Snow (address@hidden) wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> <snip>
>>>>>
>>>>>> I'd rather do something like this:
>>>>>> - Always flush bitmaps to disk on inactivate.
>>>>> Does that increase the time taken by the inactivate measurably?
>>>>> If it's small relative to everything else that's fine; it's just I
>>>>> always worry a little since I think this happens after we've stopped the
>>>>> CPU on the source, so is part of the 'downtime'.
>>>>>
>>>>> Dave
>>>>> --
>>>>> Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK
>>>>>
>>>> I'm worried that if we don't, we're leaving behind unusable, partially
>>>> complete files behind us. That's a bad design and we shouldn't push for
>>>> it just because it's theoretically faster.
>>> Oh I don't care about theoretical speed; but if it's actually unusably
>>> slow in practice then it needs fixing.
>>>
>>> Dave
>> This is not "theoretical" speed. This is real practical speed and
>> instability.
> It's theoretical until I see performance testing numbers; do you have
> any? How much faster does the pivot happen by avoiding making the qcow2
> consistent on close?
>
> I don't argue that it's faster to just simply not write data, but what's
> not obvious is how much time it actually saves in practice and if that's
> worth doing unintuitive and undocumented things like "the source file
> loses bitmaps after a migration because it was faster."
John,

pls see my letter to Dave. Speaking about theoretical things I can
avoid waiting of any guest IO. At least we have started research
in that direction.

With this code merged we'll have IO when we can avoid it completely.
That is why this approach should not be taken.

You should know, as we have discussed things originally, that
technically we can lost CBT completely and this is just one time
problem. The data will not be lost. You will just have to call full backup
once. Thus there is no need to create something much slower
and complex where there are faster ways.

Den