Re: [PATCH 0/3] Implement support for QCOW2 data files
On 8/12/24 10:36, Peter Krempa wrote:
On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 09:26:08 +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 17:34:45 +0300, Nikolai Barybin via Devel wrote:
>> There are use cases when the existing disks (i.e. LVM) are wanted
>> to be used with advanced features. For this purpose QEMU allows
>> data-file feature for qcow2 files: metadata is kept in the qcow2
>> file like usual, but guest data is written to an external file.
>> These patches enable support for this feature in libvirt.
> So this feature was once attempted to be added but was never finished
> and the comitted bits were reverted eventually. (I've purged my local
> archive so I don't have the link handy but I can look if you want the
> links to the old posting)
>
> It was deemed that this doesn't really add any performance benefit over
> storing the actual qcow2 with data inside. The qcow2 with data can be
> stored inside the LV or other block device for that matter and thus can
> provide all features that are necessary. The data file feature makes
> also the management of the metadata and data much more complex, for a
> very bad trade-off. At this point with 'qemu-img measure' it's easy to
> query the necessary size to have a fully allocated qcow2 inside the
> block device.
>
> Based on the history of this I'd like to ask you to summarize
> justifications and reasons for adding this feature before continuing.
Based on the current state of the series and what would be required to
make it viable to be accepted I very strongly suggest re-thinking if you
really need this feature, especially based on the caveats above.
Let me clarify a bit.
QCOW2 as a data file uses QCOW2 as a metadata storage for ordinary
block devices. This is a feature of QEMU and it would be quite
natural to have its representation in the libvirt as without
libvirt help QEMU could not even start with such a configuration
due to namespaces.
LVM or not LVM. How it is better in comparison with the QCOW2.
First of all, there are historical setups when the customer
uses LVM for virtual machines and does not want to reformat
his hard disks to the file system. This makes a sense as we
are avoiding two level of metadata, i.e. QCOW2 metadata over
local FS metadata. This makes the setup a little bit more
reliable. It should also be noted that QCOW2 in very specific
setups is at least 2 times slow (when L2 cache does not fit
into the dedicated amount of RAM while the disk itself is
quite big. I would admit that this problem would be seen even
for not so big 1T disks).
On top of that LVM is quite useful once we start talking about
clustered LVM setups. Clustered LVM is a good alternative
for CEPH at least for some users.
Thus this data file setup is a way to provide backups, VM
state snapshots and other features.
Den