Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] qcow2: Avoid memory over-allocation on compressed images

[Eric Blake]

On 02/21/2018 11:39 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> > See my commit message comment - we have other spots in the code base that
> > blindly g_malloc(2 * s->cluster_size).
>
> Though is that a reason to do the same in new code or to phase out such
> allocations whenever you touch them?

Touché.

> > And I intended (but sent the email without amending my commit) to use
> > g_malloc().  But as Berto has convinced me that an externally produced
> > image can convince us to read up to 4M (even though we don't need that
> > much to decompress), I suppose that the try_ variant plus checking is
> > reasonable (and care in NULL'ing out if one but not both allocations
> > succeed).
>
> Sounds good.
>
> Another thought I had is whether we should do per-request allocation for
> compressed clusters, too, instead of having per-BDS buffers.

The only benefit of a per-BDS buffer is that we cache things - multiple 
sub-cluster reads in a row all from the same compressed cluster benefit 
from decompressing only once.  The drawbacks of a per-BDS buffer: we 
can't do things in parallel (everything else in qcow2 drops the lock 
around bdrv_co_pread[v]), so the initial read prevents anything else in 
the qcow2 layer from progressing.

I also wonder - since we ARE allowing multiple parallel readers in other 
parts of qcow2 (without a patch, decompression is not in this boat, but 
decryption and even bounce buffers due to lower-layer alignment 
constraints are), what sort of mechanisms do we have for using a pool of 
reusable buffers, rather than having each cluster access that requires a 
buffer malloc and free the buffer on a per-access basis?  I don't know 
how much time the malloc/free per-transaction overhead adds, or if it is 
already much smaller than the actual I/O time.

But note that while reusable buffers from a pool would cut down on the 
per-I/O malloc/free overhead if we switch decompression away from 
per-BDS buffer, it would still not solve the fact that we only get the 
caching ability where multiple sub-cluster requests from the same 
compressed cluster require only one decompression, since that's only 
possible on a per-BDS caching level.

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
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