This introduces a qemu-img create option for qcow2 which allows the metadata to
be preallocated, i.e. clusters are reserved in the refcount table and L1/L2
tables, but no data is written to them. Metadata is quite small, so this
happens in almost no time.
Especially with qcow2 on virtio this helps to gain a bit of performance during
the initial writes. However, as soon as create a snapshot, we're back to the
normal slow speed, obviously. So this isn't the real fix, but kind of a cheat
while we're still having trouble with qcow2 on virtio.
Note that the option is disabled by default and needs to be specified
explicitly using qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o preallocation=metadata.
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
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