[Qemu-devel] Re: BTRFS: Unbelievably slow with kvm/qemu

["Justin P. Mattock" <justinmattock@gmail.com>]

On 07/12/2010 12:09 AM, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> 12.07.2010 09:24, Giangiacomo Mariotti wrote:
>> Hi, is it a known problem how much slow is Btrfs with kvm/qemu(meaning
>> that the image kvm/qemu uses as the hd is on a partition formatted
>> with Btrfs, not that the fs used by the hd inside the kvm environment
>> is Btrfs, in fact inside kvm the / partition is formatted with ext3)?
>> I haven't written down the exact numbers, because I forgot, but while
>> I was trying to make it work, after I noticed how much longer than
>> usual it was taking to just install the system, I took a look at iotop
>> and it was reporting a write speed of the kvm process of approximately
>> 3M/s, while the Btrfs kernel thread had an approximately write speed
>> of 7K/s! Just formatting the partitions during the debian installation
>> took minutes. When the actual installation of the distro started I had
>> to stop it, because it was taking hours! The iotop results made me
>> think that the problem could be Btrfs, but, to be sure that it wasn't
>> instead a kvm/qemu problem, I cut/pasted the same virtual hd on an
>> ext3 fs and started kvm with the same parameters as before. The
>> installation of debian inside kvm this time went smoothly and fast,
>> like normally it does. I've been using Btrfs for some time now and
>> while it has never been a speed champion(and I guess it's not supposed
>> to be one and I don't even really care that much about it), I've never
>> had any noticeable performance problem before and it has always been
>> quite stable. In this test case though, it seems to be doing very bad.
>
> This looks quite similar to a problem with ext4 and O_SYNC which I
> reported earlier but no one cared to answer (or read?) - there:
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/42758
> (sent to qemu-devel and linux-fsdevel lists - Cc'd too).  You can
> try a few other options, esp. cache=none and re-writing some guest
> files to verify.
>
> /mjt
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>

cool a solution... glad to see... no chance at a bisect with this?
(getting this down too a commit or two makes things easier)

Justin P. Mattock