Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCHv5 06/10] migration: search for zero instead of dup pages

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 26.03.2013 um 10:58 hat Peter Lieven geschrieben:
> virtually all dup pages are zero pages. remove
> the special is_dup_page() function and use the
> optimized buffer_find_nonzero_offset() function
> instead.
> 
> here buffer_find_nonzero_offset() is used directly
> to avoid the unnecssary additional checks in
> buffer_is_zero().
> 
> raw performace gain checking 1 GByte zeroed memory
> over is_dup_page() is approx. 10-12% with SSE2
> and 8-10% with unsigned long arithmedtic.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Peter Lieven <address@hidden>
> Reviewed-by: Orit Wasserman <address@hidden>
> Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>

Okay, so I bisected again and this is the second patch that is involved
in the slowness of qemu-iotests case 007.

The problem seems to be that the RAM of a guest is in fact _not_ zeroed
during initialisation. It hits my test case reliably because I'm running
with MALLOC_PERTURB_. Now I'm wondering if in practice this happens only
under such test conditions, or if real guests could be affected as well
and we should make sure to get zeroed memory for RAM.

Kevin