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Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 20:05:16 -0500
From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH][v2] Align file accesses with cache=off
	(O_DIRECT)
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To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
Cc: Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>, Laurent Vivier <Laurent.Vivier@bull.net>, Kevin Wolf <kwolf@suse.de>

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Paul Brook wrote:
>>> When sector-aligned guest offsets are converted to sector-unaligned
>>> writes (e.g. due to qcow2 etc.), that property is no longer satisfied,
>>> and power failure of the host disk can cause more damage than the
>>> guest is designed to be resistant to.
>>>     
>>
>> Seems like the easiest solution would be to have qcow always align 
>> its writes.
>> We don't do on the fly compression, so it should be fairly easy to 
>> make this happen with minimal overhead.
>>   
>
> That's not sufficient. O_DIRECT imposes not only offset alignment 
> requirements but also requirements on the buffer being read to. Most 
> of the code in QEMU does not properly align the read/write buffers.

For instance, the kernel loading code passes a buffer on the stack to 
bdrv_read().

That's a problem with the current patch honestly, we should not rely on 
callers to align buffers.  bdrv_read()/bdrv_aio_read()/bdrv_pread() all 
should be tolerant of unaligned buffers if we're going to support O_DIRECT.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Regards,
>
> Anthony Liguori
>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>>   
>