[PATCH 13/32] qemu: checkpoint: Don't chain bitmaps for checkpoints

Eric Blake eblake at redhat.com
Thu Jun 18 14:02:07 UTC 2020


On 6/15/20 12:10 PM, Peter Krempa wrote:
> Chaining bitmaps for checkpoints (disabling the active one and creating
> a new) severely overcomplicated all operations in regards to bitmaps.
> 
> Specifically it requires us re-matching the on-disk state to the
> internal metadata and in case of merging during block jobs it makes it
> almost impossible to cover all corner cases.
> 
> Since the checkpoints and incremental backups were not yet enabled,
> let's change the design to keep one bitmap per checkpoint. In case of
> layered snapshots this will be filled in by using dirty-bitmap-populate.
> 
> Finally the main reason for this unnecessary complexity was the fear
> that qemu's performance could degrade. In the end I think that
> addressing the performance issue will be better done in qemu (e.g by
> keeping an internal bitmap updated with changes and merging it
> periodically back to the real bitmaps. QEMU writes out changes to disk
> at shutdown so consistency is not a problem).
> 
> Removing the relationships between bitmaps frees us from complex
> handling and also makes all the surrounding code more robust as one
> broken bitmap doesn't necessarily invalidate whole chains of backups.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Peter Krempa <pkrempa at redhat.com>
> ---
>   src/qemu/qemu_checkpoint.c | 21 +--------------------
>   1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 20 deletions(-)
> 

Definitely looks simpler.  In graphics, pre-patch we had:

time --C1-----C2-----C3-----now
        :b1....:
               :b2....:
                       :b3....
where the differential from C1 is b1+b2+b3, the differential from C2 is 
b2+b3, the incremental from C3 is b3.

post-patch, we have:
time --C1-----C2-----C3-----now
        :b1...................
               :b2............
                       :b3....
where the differential from C1 is b1, the differential from C2 is b2, 
the incremental from C3 is b3.

Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake at redhat.com>

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org




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