Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Disk integrity in QEMU

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

On Friday 10 October 2008, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Paul Brook wrote:
> >> But that said, I'm concerned that this is far too confusing for users.
> >> I don't think anyone is relying on disk write performance when in
> >> write-back mode simply because the guest already has a page cache so
> >> writes are already being completed instantaneously from the
> >> application's perspective.
> >
> > This isn't entirely true. With IDE devices you don't have command
> > queueing, so it's easy for a large write to stall subsequent reads for a
> > relatively long time.
> > I'm not sure how much this effects qemu, but I've definitely seen it
> > happening on real hardware.
>
> I think that suggests we should have a cache=wb option and if people
> report slow downs with IDE, we can observe if cache=wb helps.  My
> suspicion is that it's not going to have a practical impact because as
> long as the operations are asynchronous (via DMA), then you're getting
> native-like performance.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Paul