On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Anthony Liguori <aliguori@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
The interface for copy-on-read is just an option within qemu-img create. Streaming, on the other hand, requires a bit more thought. Today, I have a monitor command that does the following:
stream <device> <sector offset>
Which will try to stream the minimal amount of data for a single I/O operation and then return how many sectors were successfully streamed.
The idea about how to drive this interface is a loop like:
offset = 0; while offset < image_size: wait_for_idle_time() count = stream(device, offset) offset += count
Obviously, the "wait_for_idle_time()" requires wide system awareness. The thing I'm not sure about is 1) would libvirt want to expose a similar stream interface and let management software determine idle time 2) attempt to detect idle time on it's own and provide a higher level interface. If (2), the question then becomes whether we should try to do this within qemu and provide libvirt a higher level interface.
A self-tuning solution is attractive because it reduces the need for other components (management stack) or the user to get involved. In this case self-tuning should be possible. We need to detect periods of I/O inactivity, for example tracking the number of in-flight requests and then setting a grace timer when it reaches zero. When the grace timer expires, we start streaming until the guest initiates I/O again. Stefan