[Bug 1538541] Re: qcow2 rejects request to use preallocation with backing file

From: Thomas Huth <1538541@bugs.launchpad.net>
To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
Subject: [Bug 1538541] Re: qcow2 rejects request to use preallocation with backing file
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2021 05:03:17 -0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <161906779753.6578.7832520806445199721.malone@chaenomeles.canonical.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 20160127125558.31349.12989.malonedeb@gac.canonical.com

The QEMU project is currently considering to move its bug tracking to
another system. For this we need to know which bugs are still valid
and which could be closed already. Thus we are setting older bugs to
"Incomplete" now.

If you still think this bug report here is valid, then please switch
the state back to "New" within the next 60 days, otherwise this report
will be marked as "Expired". Or please mark it as "Fix Released" if
the problem has been solved with a newer version of QEMU already.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience.

** Changed in: qemu
       Status: New => Incomplete

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1538541

Title:
  qcow2 rejects request to use preallocation with backing file

Status in QEMU:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  The 'preallocation=full' option to qemu-img / qcow2 block driver
  instructs QEMU to fully allocate the host file to the maximum size
  needed by the logical disk size.

  $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o preallocation=full base.qcow2 200M
  Formatting 'base.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=209715200 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 preallocation='full' lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16

  $ ls -alhs base.qcow2 
  201M -rw-r--r--. 1 berrange berrange 201M Jan 27 12:49 base.qcow2

  When specifying a backing file for the qcow2 file, however, it rejects the preallocation request

  $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o preallocation=full,backing_file=base.qcow2 front.qcow2 200M
  Formatting 'front.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=209715200 backing_file='base.qcow2' encryption=off cluster_size=65536 preallocation='full' lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16
  qemu-img: front.qcow2: Backing file and preallocation cannot be used at the same time

  It might seem like requesting full preallocation is redundant because most data associated with the image will be present in the backing file, as so the top layer is unlikely to ever need the full preallocation.  Rejecting this, however, means it is not (officially) possible to reserve disk space for the top layer to guarantee that future copy-on-writes will never get ENOSPC.

  OpenStack in particular uses backing files with all images, in order
  to avoid the I/O overhead of copying the backing file contents into
  the per-VM disk image. It, however, still wants to have a guarantee
  that the per-VM image will never hit an ENOSPC scenario.

  Currently it has to hack around QEMU's refusal to allow backing_file +
  preallocation, by calling 'fallocate' on the qcow2 file after it has
  been created. This is an inexact fix though, because it doesn't take
  account of fact that qcow2 metadata can takes some MBs of space.

  Thus, it would like to see preallocation=full supported in combination
  with backing files.

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