Re: [PATCH 09/17] block: Refactor bdrv_has_zero_init{,_truncate}

[Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>]

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On 04.02.20 20:03, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 2/4/20 11:53 AM, Max Reitz wrote:
>> On 31.01.20 18:44, Eric Blake wrote:
>>> Having two slightly-different function names for related purposes is
>>> unwieldy, especially since I envision adding yet another notion of
>>> zero support in an upcoming patch.  It doesn't help that
>>> bdrv_has_zero_init() is a misleading name (I originally thought that a
>>> driver could only return 1 when opening an already-existing image
>>> known to be all zeroes; but in reality many drivers always return 1
>>> because it only applies to a just-created image).
>>
>> I don’t find it misleading, I just find it meaningless, which then makes
>> it open to interpretation (or maybe rather s/interpretation/wishful
>> thinking/).
>>
>>> Refactor all uses
>>> to instead have a single function that returns multiple bits of
>>> information, with better naming and documentation.
>>
>> It doesn’t make sense to me.  How exactly is it unwieldy?  In the sense
>> that we have to deal with multiple rather small implementation functions
>> rather than a big one per driver?  Actually, multiple small functions
>> sounds better to me – unless the three implementations share common code.
> 
> Common code for dealing with encryption, backing files, and so on.  It
> felt like I had a lot of code repetition when keeping functions separate.

Well, I suppose “dealing with” means “if (encrypted || has_backing)”, so
duplicating that doesn’t seem too bad.

>> As for the callers, they only want a single flag out of the three, don’t
>> they?  If so, it doesn’t really matter for them.
> 
> The qemu-img.c caller in patch 10 checks ZERO_CREATE | ZERO_OPEN, so we
> DO have situations of checking more than one bit, vs. needing two
> function calls.

Hm, OK.  Not sure if that place would look worse with two function
calls, but, well.

>> In fact, I can imagine that drivers can trivially return
>> BDRV_ZERO_TRUNCATE information (because the preallocation mode is
>> fixed), whereas BDRV_ZERO_CREATE can be a bit more involved, and
>> BDRV_ZERO_OPEN could take even more time because some (constant-time)
>> inquiries have to be done.
> 
> In looking at the rest of the series, drivers were either completely
> trivial (in which case, declaring:
> 
> .bdrv_has_zero_init = bdrv_has_zero_init_1,
> .bdrv_has_zero_init_truncate = bdrv_has_zero_init_1,
> 
> was a lot wordier than the new:
> 
> .bdrv_known_zeroes = bdrv_known_zeroes_truncate,

Not sure if that’s bad, though.

> ), or completely spelled out but where both creation and truncation were
> determined in the same amount of effort.

Well, usually, the effort is minimal, but OK.

>> And thus callers which just want the trivially obtainable
>> BDRV_ZERO_TRUNCATE info have to wait for the BDRV_ZERO_OPEN inquiry,
>> even though they don’t care about that flag.
> 
> True, but only to a minor extent; and the documentation mentions that
> the BDRV_ZERO_OPEN calculation MUST NOT be as expensive as a blind
> block_status loop.

So it must be less expensive than an arbitrarily complex loop.  I think
a single SEEK_DATA/HOLE call was something like O(n) on tmpfs?

What I’m trying to say is that this is not a good limit and can mean
anything.

I do think this limit definition makes sense for callers that want to
know about ZERO_OPEN.  But I don’t know why we would have to let other
callers wait, too.

> Meanwhile, callers tend to only care about
> bdrv_known_zeroes() right after opening an image or right before
> resizing (not repeatedly during runtime);

Hm, yes.  I was thinking of parallels, but that only checks once in
parallels_open(), so it’s OK.

> and you also argued elsewhere
> in this thread that it may be worth having the block layer cache
> BDRV_ZERO_OPEN and update the cache on any write,

I didn’t say the block layer, but it if makes sense.

> at which point, the
> expense in the driver callback really is a one-time call during
> bdrv_co_open().

It definitely doesn’t make sense to me to do that call unconditionally
in bdrv_co_open().

> And in that case, whether the one-time expense is done
> via a single function call or via three driver callbacks, the amount of
> work is the same; but the driver callback interface is easier if there
> is only one callback (similar to how bdrv_unallocated_blocks_are_zero()
> calls bdrv_get_info() only for bdi.unallocated_blocks_are_zero, even
> though BlockDriverInfo tracks much more than that boolean).
> 
> In fact, it may be worth consolidating known zeroes support into
> BlockDriverInfo.

I’m very skeptical of that.  BDI already has the problem that it doesn’t
know which of the information the caller actually wants and that it is
sometimes used in a quasi-hot path.

Maybe that means it is indeed time to incorporate it into BDI, but the
caller should have a way of specifying what parts of BDI it actually
needs and then drivers can skip anything that isn’t trivially obtainable
that the caller doesn’t need.

>> So I’d leave it as separate functions so drivers can feel free to have
>> implementations for BDRV_ZERO_OPEN that take more than mere microseconds
>> but that are more accurate.
>>
>> (Or maybe if you really want it to be a single functions, callers could
>> pass the mask of flags they care about.  If all flags are trivially
>> obtainable, the implementations would then simply create their result
>> mask and & it with the caller-given mask.  For implementations where
>> some branches could take a bit more time, those branches are only taken
>> when the caller cares about the given flag.  But again, I don’t
>> necessarily think having a single function is more easily handleable
>> than three smaller ones.)
> 
> Those are still viable options, but before I repaint the bikeshed along
> those lines, I'd at least like a review of whether the overall idea of
> having a notion of 'reads-all-zeroes' is indeed useful enough,
> regardless of how we implement it as one vs. three driver callbacks.

I’m as hesitant as ever to give a review that this notion is useful,
because I haven’t seen a practical example yet where the problem isn’t
the fact that NBD doesn’t have 64-bit write_zeroes support.

So far, it looks to me like this notion is only really useful for cases
where we expect a management layer on top of qemu anyway.  And then I’m
not sure that this new feature works reliably enough for such a
management layer.

(I’m not saying it isn’t useful.  Again, intuitively it does seem
useful.  Intuition can be enough to merge a sufficiently simple series
that doesn’t increase code complexity too much.  But I’m still asking
for actual practical examples, because that would make a better
argument, of course.)

Max


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