Re: [PATCH V2] hw/riscv: virt: Remove size restriction for pflash

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:

> On Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 06:32:01PM +0100, Andrew Jones wrote:

[...]

>> Padding is a good idea, but too much causes other problems. When building
>> lightweight VMs which may pull the firmware image from a network,
>> AArch64 VMs require 64MB of mostly zeros to be transferred first, which
>> can become a substantial amount of the overall boot time[*]. Being able to
>> create images smaller than the total flash device size, but still add some
>> pad for later growth, seems like the happy-medium to shoot for.
>
> QEMU configures the firmware using -blockdev,

Yes, even though the devices in question are not block devices.

>                                               so can use any file
> format that QEMU supports at the block layer.  IOW, you can store
> the firmware in a qcow2 file and thus you will never fetch any
> of the padding zeros to be transferred.  That said I'm not sure
> that libvirt supports anything other than a raw file today. 

Here's another idea.  The "raw" format supports exposing a slice of the
underlying block node (options @offset and @size).  It could support
padding.  Writing to the padding should then grow the underlying node.

Taking a step back to look at the bigger picture...  there are three
issues, I think:

(A) Storing padding on disk is wasteful.

    Use a file system that supports sparse files, or an image format
    that can represent the padding efficiently.

(B) Reading padding into memory is wasteful.

    Matters mostly when a network is involved.  Use an image format that
    can represent the padding efficiently.

(C) Dirtying memory for padding is wasteful.

    I figure KSM could turn zero-padding into holes.

    We could play with mmap() & friends.

    Other ideas?

Any solution needs to work both for read-only and read/write padding.
Throwing away data written to the padding on cold restart is not what
I'd regard as "works".