On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Anthony Liguori
<address@hidden> wrote:
The interface for copy-on-read is just an option within qemu-img create.
Streaming, on the other hand, requires a bit more thought. Today, I have a
monitor command that does the following:
stream<device> <sector offset>
Which will try to stream the minimal amount of data for a single I/O
operation and then return how many sectors were successfully streamed.
The idea about how to drive this interface is a loop like:
offset = 0;
while offset< image_size:
wait_for_idle_time()
count = stream(device, offset)
offset += count
Obviously, the "wait_for_idle_time()" requires wide system awareness. The
thing I'm not sure about is 1) would libvirt want to expose a similar stream
interface and let management software determine idle time 2) attempt to
detect idle time on it's own and provide a higher level interface. If (2),
the question then becomes whether we should try to do this within qemu and
provide libvirt a higher level interface.
A self-tuning solution is attractive because it reduces the need for
other components (management stack) or the user to get involved. In
this case self-tuning should be possible. We need to detect periods
of I/O inactivity, for example tracking the number of in-flight
requests and then setting a grace timer when it reaches zero. When
the grace timer expires, we start streaming until the guest initiates
I/O again.