Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 1/6] cutils: extract buffer_is_zero() from qemu-img.c

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

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On 12/21/2011 09:00 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> The qemu-img.c:is_not_zero() function checks if a buffer contains all
> zeroes.  This function will come in handy for zero-detection in the
> block layer, so clean it up and move it to cutils.c.
> 
> Note that the function now returns true if the buffer is all zeroes.
> This avoids the double-negatives (i.e. !is_not_zero()) that the old
> function can cause in callers.

Are there plans to improve the efficiency of buffer_is_zero to take
advantage of metadata about sparseness?

That is, there are cases where we can use metadata to prove a region of
a file is sparse, without having to read every byte within that region.
 Now that this series is giving QED special metadata that marks a zero
cluster, it is faster to query if that metadata exists denoting a zero
cluster than it is to read the entire cluster and check for non-zero.
Likewise, with regular files, the kernel provides lseek(SEEK_HOLE) (or
the older, lower-level, ioctl(FS_IOC_FIEMAP)); which at least GNU
coreutils is using for efficient sparse detection in source files.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org


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