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Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH] qcow2: do lazy allocation of the L
From: |
Alberto Garcia |
Subject: |
Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH] qcow2: do lazy allocation of the L2 cache |
Date: |
Fri, 08 May 2015 11:00:08 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Notmuch/0.13.2 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) |
On Fri 24 Apr 2015 03:04:06 PM CEST, Kevin Wolf <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >> I think it would be nice to have a way to free unused cache
>> >> entries after a while.
>> >
>> > Do you think mmap plus a periodic timer would work?
>> >
>> > I'm hesitant about changes like this because they make QEMU more
>> > complex, slow down the guest, and make the memory footprint
>> > volatile. But if a simple solution addresses the problem, then I'd
>> > be happy.
>>
>> I understand. One possible approach would be to use the timer only if
>> the cache size requested by the user is large, so
>>
>> 1) we only try to save memory when the amount of memory to save is
>> significant.
>> 2) we don't make the default scenario slower.
>>
>> I'll try to see if I can come up with a good solution (and with more
>> numbers).
>
> I suspect that at this point, Anthony would have reminded us about
> separation of policy and mechanism. The very least we need is some
> option to control the policy (probably defaulting to no automatic
> cache size changes).
There's also the problem that with a single chunk of memory for all
cache tables it's not so easy to free individual entries.
One possible solution would be madvise() with MADV_DONTNEED, and that's
rather simple to use, but I'm unsure about its portability.
> The other option would be to let the management tool change the cache
> size options at runtime (and as it happens, my current bdrv_reopen()
> overhaul allows just that - except that a QMP interface isn't planned
> yet), but I'm not sure if it has enough information to make good
> decisions. If we know what the criteria are, they could possibly be
> exposed, though.
But what would you do there? Recreate the whole cache?
Berto
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH] qcow2: do lazy allocation of the L2 cache,
Alberto Garcia <=