Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] info blockstats (block-qcow2): show highest allocated offset (bytes)

[Uri Lublin <uril@redhat.com>]

Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Uri Lublin schrieb:
>> Although there may be many free blocks below that number (allocated and
>> freed)
>> the file system can not deallocate those blocks, and they have to be reused
>> by qemu. Also note that due to fragmentation those free blocks may not
>> be used on next allocations.
> 
> Any idea what would it mean to performance if we changed the behaviour
> so that s->free_cluster_index always points to lowest free cluster? Then
> most of the fragmentation should be gone.

I don't know, it has to be implemented and measured.

> 
> If the impact would be too big we could still change the code to use two
> free_cluster_indexes, one for single cluster allocation and one for
> larger blocks. This was suggested earlier and I think there were even
> patches for it, but I don't seem to remember who exactly suggested this.

That should make qcow2 images less defragmented.

Thanks,
     Uri.