Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v1 3/3] qcow2: add zstd cluster compression

[Eric Blake]

On 7/3/19 6:00 AM, Denis Plotnikov wrote:
> zstd significantly reduces cluster compression time.
> It provides better compression performance maintaining
> the same level of compression ratio in comparison with
> zlib, which, by the moment, has been the only compression
> method available.
> 

> ---
>  block/qcow2.c        | 96 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  configure            | 32 +++++++++++++++
>  qapi/block-core.json |  3 +-
>  3 files changed, 130 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

Where is the change to docs/interop/qcow2.txt to describe this new
compression format?

> 
> diff --git a/block/qcow2.c b/block/qcow2.c
> index 37a563a671..caa04b0beb 100644
> --- a/block/qcow2.c
> +++ b/block/qcow2.c
> @@ -27,6 +27,11 @@
>  #define ZLIB_CONST
>  #include <zlib.h>
>  

> +static ssize_t qcow2_zstd_compress(void *dest, size_t dest_size,
> +                                   const void *src, size_t src_size)
> +{
> +    ssize_t ret;
> +    uint32_t *c_size = dest;
> +    /* steal some bytes to store compressed chunk size */
> +    char *d_buf = ((char *) dest) + sizeof(*c_size);
> +

Do you always want exactly 4 bytes for the compressed size? Or is it
worth some sort of variable-length encoding, since we're already dealing
with non-cacheline-aligned data? You can represent all sizes up to 4M
using a maximum of 3 bytes (set the high bit if the integer continues,
then sizes 0-127 take 1 byte [7 bits], 128-32767 take 2 bytes [15 bits],
and 32768-4194303 take 3 bytes [22 bits]).

> +    if (dest_size < sizeof(*c_size)) {
> +        return -ENOMEM;
> +    }
> +
> +    dest_size -= sizeof(*c_size);
> +
> +    ret = ZSTD_compress(d_buf, dest_size, src, src_size, 5);

The fact that you are storing the size separate from the data passed to
zstd MUST be documented in the qcow2 spec, for the next person to
produce/consume the same data.


> +++ b/qapi/block-core.json
> @@ -4215,11 +4215,12 @@
>  # Compression type used in qcow2 image file
>  #
>  # @zlib:  zlib compression, see <http://zlib.net/>
> +# @zstd:  zstd compression, see <http://github.com/facebook/zstd>
>  #
>  # Since: 4.1
>  ##
>  { 'enum': 'Qcow2CompressionType',
> -  'data': [ 'zlib' ] }
> +  'data': [ 'zlib', 'zstd' ] }

Since you patched configure so that linking against zstd is optional,
this should use { 'name':'zstd', 'if':'CONDITIONAL' } so that during
introspection, the enum only advertises zstd on a build that linked
against the library.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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