[Libguestfs] [PATCH v3 0/3] v2v: simplify driver copying from virtio-win iso

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 12:27:58PM +0300, Roman Kagan wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:07:45AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 07:55:41PM +0300, Roman Kagan wrote:
> > > Libguestfs supports passing an ISO image as a source of virtio windows
> > > drivers to v2v.
> > > 
> > > This series attempts to make it simpler and better scoped.
> > 
> > Looks good (apart from patch 3 - the Gc.compact is necessary!)
> 
> Why?  As a matter of fact that was the primary reason I even started
> with this patchset: that Gc.compact was sitting in the middle of the
> main v2v function and was yet another obstacle in the refactoring I was
> after.
> 
> Now that the extra guestfs handle doesn't survive beyond
> copy_virtio_drivers() what is the need for that explicit GC (which was
> introduced at the time exactly to clear up that handle in commit
> 47b5f245bec908f803f0a89c3b1e3166cfe33aad)?

Just because the handle becomes unreachable doesn't mean the GC will
immediately collect it.  Objects are only required to be finalized
when you invoke Gc.full_major (Gc.compact calls Gc.full_major).

Previous to these patches, the handle was still unreachable, but
Gc.compact didn't free it because of a different problem.  That
different issue has been fixed by:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/8bbc5e73cb5b56b5cfbe979ac0e1c14d1701a0d8

In summary, we still need to call Gc.compact before doing the
long-running copy operation, to make sure that the resources used by
virt-v2v are minimized during the copy.

Rich.

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