Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC][PATCH 11/12] qcow2: Convert qcow2 to use coroutines for async I/O

[Anthony Liguori]

On 01/26/2011 10:13 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Serializing against a global mutex has the advantage that it can be 
> treated as a global lock that is decomposed into fine-grained locks.
>
> For example, we can start the code conversion from an explict async 
> model to a threaded sync model by converting the mutex into a 
> shared/exclusive lock.  Operations like read and write take the lock 
> for shared access (and take a fine-grained mutex on the metadata cache 
> entry), while operation like creating a snapshot take the lock for 
> exclusive access.  That doesn't work with freeze/thaw.

The trouble with this is that you increase the amount of re-entrance 
whereas freeze/thaw doesn't.

The code from the beginning of the request to where the mutex is 
acquired will be executed for every single request even while requests 
are blocked at the mutex acquisition.

With freeze/thaw, you freeze the queue and prevent any request from 
starting until you thaw.  You only thaw and return control to allow 
another request to execute when you begin executing an asynchronous I/O 
callback.

I think my previous example was wrong, you really want to do:

qcow2_aio_writev() {
   coroutine {
       freeze();
       sync_io(); // existing qcow2 code
       thaw();
       // existing non I/O code
       bdrv_aio_writev(callback); // no explicit freeze/thaw needed
   }
}

This is equivalent to our existing code because no new re-entrance is 
introduced.  The only re-entrancy points are in the 
bdrv_aio_{readv,writev} calls.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori