Discard is advisory, so rounding the requests to alignment
boundaries is never semantically wrong from the data that
the guest sees. But at least the Dell Equallogic iSCSI SANs
has an interesting property that its advertised discard
alignment is 15M, yet documents that discarding a sequence
of 1M slices will eventually result in the 15M page being
marked as discarded, and it is possible to observe which
pages have been discarded.
Between commits 9f1963b and b8d0a980, we converted the block
layer to a byte-based interface that ultimately ignores any
unaligned head or tail based on the driver's advertised
discard granularity, which means that qemu 2.7 refuses to
pass any discard request smaller than 15M down to the Dell
Equallogic hardware. This is a slight regression in behavior
compared to earlier qemu, where a guest executing discards
in power-of-2 chunks used to be able to get every page
discarded, but is now left with various pages still allocated
because the guest requests did not align with the hardware's
15M pages.
Since the SCSI specification says nothing about a minimum
discard granularity, and only documents the preferred
alignment, it is best if the block layer gives the driver
every bit of information about discard requests, rather than
rounding it to alignment boundaries early.
Rework the block layer discard algorithm to mirror the write
zero algorithm: always peel off any unaligned head or tail
and manage that in isolation, then do the bulk of the request
on an aligned boundary. The fallback when the driver returns
-ENOTSUP for an unaligned request is to silently ignore that
portion of the discard request; but for devices that can pass
the partial request all the way down to hardware, this can
result in the hardware coalescing requests and discarding
aligned pages after all.
Reported by: Peter Lieven <pl@kamp.de>
CC: qemu-stable@nongnu.org
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
QEMU README
===========
QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and
virtualizer.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without any
need for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation,
it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xen
and KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing the
hypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achieve
near native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it is
capable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7
board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).
QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux
and BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against one
architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using a
different architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does not
involve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.
QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly
by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings.
It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management
layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API.
It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using
open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.
QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.
Building
========
QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modern
Linux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a variety
of other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make
Additional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:
http://qemu-project.org/Hosts/Linux
http://qemu-project.org/Hosts/W32
Submitting patches
==================
The QEMU source code is maintained under the GIT version control system.
git clone git://git.qemu-project.org/qemu.git
When submitting patches, the preferred approach is to use 'git
format-patch' and/or 'git send-email' to format & send the mail to the
qemu-devel@nongnu.org mailing list. All patches submitted must contain
a 'Signed-off-by' line from the author. Patches should follow the
guidelines set out in the HACKING and CODING_STYLE files.
Additional information on submitting patches can be found online via
the QEMU website
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/TrivialPatches
Bug reporting
=============
The QEMU project uses Launchpad as its primary upstream bug tracker. Bugs
found when running code built from QEMU git or upstream released sources
should be reported via:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/
If using QEMU via an operating system vendor pre-built binary package, it
is preferable to report bugs to the vendor's own bug tracker first. If
the bug is also known to affect latest upstream code, it can also be
reported via launchpad.
For additional information on bug reporting consult:
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/ReportABug
Contact
=======
The QEMU community can be contacted in a number of ways, with the two
main methods being email and IRC
- qemu-devel@nongnu.org
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
- #qemu on irc.oftc.net
Information on additional methods of contacting the community can be
found online via the QEMU website:
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/StartHere
-- End