KVM call agenda for Nov 23

Please send in any agenda items you are interested in covering.

thanks, Juan.

QCOW2 performance roadmap:
* What can be done to achieve near-raw image format performance?
* Benchmark results from an ideal QCOW2 model.

Stefan

Am 22.11.2010 14:55, schrieb Stefan Hajnoczi:

Some thoughts on qcow2 performance:

== Fully allocated image ==
Should be able to perform similar to raw because there is very little handling of metadata. Additional I/O only if an L2 table must be read from the disk.

* Should we increase the L2 table cache size to make it happen less often? (Currently 16 * 512 MB, QED uses more)

Known problems:
* Synchronous read of L2 tables; should be made async
** General thought on making things async: Coroutines? What happened to that proposal?
* We may want to have online defragmentation eventually

== Growing stand-alone image ==
Stand-alone images (i.e. images without a backing file) aren't that interesting because you would use raw for them anyway if you needed optimal performance. We need to be "good enough" here.

However, all of the problems that arise from dealing with metadata apply for the really interesting third case, so optimizing them is an important step on the way.

Known problems:
* Needs a bdrv_flush between refcount table and L2 table write
* Synchronous metadata updates
* Both to be solved by block-queue
** Batches writes and makes the async, can greatly reduce number of bdrv_flush calls
** Except for cache=writethrough, but this is secondary
** Should we make cache=off the default caching mode in qemu? writethrough seems to be a bit too much anyway irrespective of the image format.
* Synchronous refcount table reads
** How frequent are cache misses?
** Making this one async is much harder than L2 table reads. We can make it a goal for mid-term, but short term we should make it hurt less if it's a problem in practice.
*** It's probably not, because (without internal snapshots or compression) we never free clusters, so we fill it sequentially and only load a new one when the old one is full - and that one we don't even read, but write, so block-queue will help
* Things like refcount table growth are completely synchronous. ** Not a real problem, because it happens approximately never.

== Growing image with backing file ==
This is the really interesting scenario where you need an image format that provides some features. For qcow2, it's mostly the same as above.

See stand-alone, plus:
* Needs an bdrv_flush between COW and writing to the L2 table ** qcow2 has already one after refcount table write, so no additional overhead
* Synchronous COW
** Should be fairly easy to make async

Performance figures from a series of I/O scenarios:
http://wiki.qemu.org/Qcow2/PerformanceRoadmap

Stefan

Am 23.11.2010 15:53, schrieb Stefan Hajnoczi:

I added my list to this wiki page now, so that digging them up in the mailing list archive won't be necessary later.

Kevin

usb-ccid

aka external device emulation in qemu.

This is an easy topic to discuss in an abstract sense and I'm sure everyone has an opinion. However, what's needed is deep review of the current code with an eye towards all of the possible issues we will face in the future including live migration, configurability, and compatibility. I need to find some time to spend with the appropriate specs.

It would be a lot simpler just to include the emulation in qemu like we do for every other device...

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

- vcpu hard limits

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

- 0.14 (release date, bug day, -rc planning, etc)

23.11.2010 15:08, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
[]

Um, can we have some 0.13.x before, please?.. :)

/mjt

Please send in any agenda items you are interested in covering.

thanks, Dor

Juan already has a thread for agenda items. It includes:

"As I forgot to put the call for agenda befor, Anthony already suggested:
- 2011 kvm conference
- 0.14.0 release plan
- infrastructure changes (irc channel migration, git tree migration)"

Stefan

nested vmx? must pick up pace if want to merge.

error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function