Re: [Qemu-devel] block: Review of .has_zero_init use

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 25.06.2013 um 14:05 hat Richard W.M. Jones geschrieben:
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 01:39:11PM +0200, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> > * ssh           - currently has_zero_init = 1 (is this correct?)
> [...]
> > It might be possible that the correct value depends on the backend on
> > the server side for some protocols - for example, I think for SSH it
> > depends on whether you access a regular file or a block device on the
> > other host (if accessing a block device is even possible).
> 
> This seems to depend on the behaviour of O_TRUNC on block devices.
> The man page says it's unspecified, but I tested it on Linux, and
> Linux ignores it (for logical volumes anyway).
> 
> When the ssh driver is asked to do bdrv_create it does on the
> remote end:
> 
>  - open (filename, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0644) [1]
>  - lseek (fd, size-1, SEEK_SET)                  [2]
>  - write (fd, &'\0', 1)
> 
> In other words for regular files, it creates a sparse file.  For block
> devices, I tested the sequence above, and it doesn't fail.
> 
> So .. I guess that has_zero_init = 0 would be correct?

Yes, that's my understanding.

> Unless we fstat the fd after opening it and return some conditional
> value from bdrv_has_zero_init eg if it's a block device.  Is that
> possible?

.bdrv_has_zero_init is a callback that gets a specific BlockDriverState,
so it's possible to do some checks in there. If you can get the
necessary information using SSH, doing it dynamically is certainly an
option.

Kevin