BTW, how do you usually measure the time to install a Linux distro within? Most distros ISOs do NOT have unattended installation ISOs in place. (True I can bake my own ISOs for this...) But do you have any ISOs made ready for this purpose?

On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 11:54 AM phoeagon <phoeagon@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks. Dbench does not logically allocate new disk space all the time, because it's a FS level benchmark that creates file and deletes them. Therefore it also depends on the guest FS, say, a btrfs guest FS allocates about 1.8x space of that from EXT4, due to its COW nature. It does cause the FS to allocate some space during about 1/3 of the test duration I think. But this does not mitigate it too much because a FS often writes in a stride rather than consecutively, which causes write amplification at allocation times.

So I tested it with qemu-img convert from a 400M raw file:

zheq-PC sdb # time ~/qemu-sync-test/bin/qemu-img convert -f raw -t unsafe -O vdi /run/shm/rand 1.vdi

real 0m0.402s

user 0m0.206s

sys 0m0.202s

zheq-PC sdb # time ~/qemu-sync-test/bin/qemu-img convert -f raw -t writeback -O vdi /run/shm/rand 1.vdi