Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Introduce cache images for the QCOW2 format

[Fam Zheng]

On Wed, 08/14 13:28, Kaveh Razavi wrote:
> On 08/14/2013 12:53 AM, Alex Bligh wrote:
> > What is this cache keyed on and how is it invalidated? Let's say a
> > 2 VM on node X boot with backing file A. The first populates the cache,
> > and the second utilises the cache. I then stop both VMs, delete
> > the derived disks, and change the contents of the backing file. I then
> > boot a VM using the changed backing file on node X and node Y. I think
> > node Y is going to get the clean backing file. However, how does node
> > X know not to use the cache? Would it not be a good idea to check
> > (at least) the inode number and the mtime of the backing file correspond
> > with values saved in the cache, and if not the same then ignore the
> > cache?
> 
> You could argue the same for normal qcow2. Start from a cow image with a
> backing image, stop the VM. Start another VM, modifying the backing
> image directly. Start the VM again, this time from the cow image, and
> the VM can see stale data in the stored data clusters of the cow image.
> 
> The idea is once a user registers an image to a cloud middleware, it is
> assigned an image ID. As long as the middleware assigns a cache to the
> backing image with the same ID, there is no possibility to read stale
> data. If it is desired to have some sort of check at the qemu level, it
> should be implemented in the qcow2 directly for all backing files and
> this extension will benefit from it too.
> 
Yes, this one sounds good to have. VMDK and VHDX have this kind of
backing file status validation.

Thanks.

Fam