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From: "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com>
To: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Cc: Alex Kalenyuk <akalenyu@redhat.com>,
	Adam Litke <alitke@redhat.com>,
	qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kwolf@redhat.com, nsoffer@redhat.com
Subject: Re: qemu-img cache modes with Linux cgroup v1
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2023 17:06:46 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20230731160636.GO7636@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230731154036.GA1258836@fedora>

On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 11:40:36AM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> 3. Using buffered I/O because O_DIRECT is not universally supported?
> 
> If you can't use O_DIRECT, then qemu-img could be extended to manage its
> dirty page cache set carefully. This consists of picking a budget and
> writing back to disk when the budget is exhausted. Richard Jones has
> shared links covering posix_fadvise(2) and sync_file_range(2):
> https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1005.2/01845.html
> https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1005.2/01953.html
> 
> We can discuss qemu-img code changes and performance analysis more if
> you decide to take that direction.

There's a bit more detail in these two commits:

  https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/libnbd/-/commit/64d50d994dd7062d5cce21f26f0e8eba0e88c87e
  https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/a956e2e75d6c88eeefecd967505667c9f176e3af

In my experience this method is much better than using O_DIRECT,
it has much fewer sharp edges.

By the way, this is a super-useful tool for measuring how much of the
page cache is being used to cache a file:

  https://github.com/Feh/nocache

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch
http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html



  reply	other threads:[~2023-07-31 16:07 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-07-31 15:40 qemu-img cache modes with Linux cgroup v1 Stefan Hajnoczi
2023-07-31 16:06 ` Richard W.M. Jones [this message]
2023-07-31 17:19 ` Daniel P. Berrangé
2023-07-31 19:15   ` Stefan Hajnoczi
2024-05-06 17:10     ` Alex Kalenyuk
2024-05-06 18:24       ` Stefan Hajnoczi

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