Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH for-2.8] block: Let write zeroes fallback work even with small max_transfer

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1137 bytes --]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 04:52:15PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> Commit 443668ca rewrote the write_zeroes logic to guarantee that
> an unaligned request never crosses a cluster boundary.  But
> in the rewrite, the new code assumed that at most one iteration
> would be needed to get to an alignment boundary.
> 
> However, it is easy to trigger an assertion failure: the Linux
> kernel limits loopback devices to advertise a max_transfer of
> only 64k.  Any operation that requires falling back to writes
> rather than more efficient zeroing must obey max_transfer during
> that fallback, which means an unaligned head may require multiple
> iterations of the write fallbacks before reaching the aligned
> boundaries, when layering a format with clusters larger than 64k
> atop the protocol of file access to a loopback device.
> 
> Test case:
> 
> $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o cluster_size=1M file 10M
> $ losetup /dev/loop2 /path/to/file
> $ qemu-io -f qcow2 /dev/loop2
> qemu-io> w 7m 1k
> qemu-io> w -z 8003584 2093056

Please include a qemu-iotests test case to protect against regressions.

Thanks,
Stefan

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 455 bytes --]