Lazy refcounts is a performance optimization for qcow2 that postpones
refcount metadata updates and instead marks the image dirty. In the
case of crash or power failure the image will be left in a dirty state
and repaired next time it is opened.
Reducing metadata I/O is important for cache=writethrough and
cache=directsync because these modes guarantee that data is on disk
after each write (hence we cannot take advantage of caching updates in
RAM). Refcount metadata is not needed for guest->file block address
translation and therefore does not need to be on-disk at the time of
write completion - this is the motivation behind the lazy refcount
optimization.
The lazy refcount optimization must be enabled at image creation time:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o compat=1.1,lazy_refcounts=on a.qcow2 10G
qemu-system-x86_64 -drive if=virtio,file=a.qcow2,cache=writethrough
Update qemu-iotests 031 and 036 since the extension header size changes
when we add feature bit table entries.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
bfe8043e92