Re: [RFC PATCH v2 13/26] qcow2: Add subcluster support to calculate_l2_meta()

[Alberto Garcia]

On Mon 04 Nov 2019 03:21:41 PM CET, Max Reitz wrote:
>> If an image has subclusters then there are more copy-on-write
>> scenarios that we need to consider. Let's say we have a write request
>> from the middle of subcluster #3 until the end of the cluster:
>> 
>>    - If the cluster is new, then subclusters #0 to #3 from the old
>>      cluster must be copied into the new one.
>
> You mean for snapshots?
>
> (That isn’t quite clear, and I only guess this based on the next
> bullet point which differentiates based on “the old cluster was
> unallocated”.  That’s weird, too, because what does that mean, old
> cluster and new cluster?

Yes, perhaps the terminology is a bit unclear.

When I say "new cluster" is this context I mean that a write request
requires that a new cluster is allocated in the qcow2 file.

Then the "old cluster" would be what was there before the write (i.e. a
cluster with refcount > 1 or an unallocated cluster). Where we are doing
the copy-on-write from.

>>   * If @keep_old is true it means that the clusters were already
>>   * allocated and will be overwritten. If false then the clusters are
>>   * new and we have to decrease the reference count of the old ones.
>> + *
>> + * Returns 1 on success, -errno on failure.
>
> I think there should be a note here on why this doesn’t follow the
> general 0/-errno schema (i.e., “, because that is what callers generally
> expect”).

Good idea.

>> +    if (!keep_old) {
>> +        switch (type) {
>> +        case QCOW2_CLUSTER_NORMAL:
>> +        case QCOW2_CLUSTER_COMPRESSED:
>> +        case QCOW2_CLUSTER_ZERO_ALLOC:
>> +        case QCOW2_CLUSTER_UNALLOCATED_SUBCLUSTER:
>> +            cow_start_from = 0;
>
> Somehow (I don’t know why) I find this a bit tough to understand.
>
> Wouldn’t it work to let cow_start start from the first subcluster for
> ZERO_ALLOC and UNALLOCATED_SUBCLUSTER?  We don’t need to COW those, it
> should be sufficient to just make the subclusters before that zero or
> unallocated, respectively.

Here's one good example why I should probably add a QCow2SubclusterType
different from the existing QCow2ClusterType.

In this context, 'type' is the type of the subcluster, and because of
that _ZERO_ALLOC means that the subcluster reads as zeros but the
cluster itself is allocated. Other subcluster may contain data and
that's why we have to copy all of them.

Berto