On 04.02.20 18:50, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 2/4/20 11:34 AM, Max Reitz wrote:
> 
>>> +++ b/include/block/block.h
>>> @@ -105,6 +105,16 @@ typedef enum {
>>>        * for drivers that set .bdrv_co_truncate.
>>>        */
>>>       BDRV_ZERO_TRUNCATE      = 0x2,
>>> +
>>> +    /*
>>> +     * bdrv_known_zeroes() should include this bit if an image is
>>> +     * known to read as all zeroes when first opened; this bit should
>>> +     * not be relied on after any writes to the image.
>>
>> Is there a good reason for this?  Because to me this screams like we are
>> going to check this flag without ensuring that the image has actually
>> not been written to yet.  So if it’s generally easy for drivers to stop
>> reporting this flag after a write, then maybe we should do so.
> 
> In patch 15 (implementing things in qcow2), I actually wrote the driver
> to return live results, rather than just open-time results, in part
> because writing the bit to persistent storage in qcow2 means that the
> bit must be accurate, without relying on the block layer's help.
> 
> But my pending NBD patch (not posted yet, but will be soon), the
> proposal I'm making for the NBD protocol itself is just open-time, not
> live, and so it would be more work than necessary to make the NBD driver
> report live results.
> 
> But it seems like it should be easy enough to also patch the block layer
> itself to guarantee that callers of bdrv_known_zeroes() cannot see this
> bit set if the block layer has been used in any non-zero transaction, by
> repeating the same logic as used in qcow2 to kill the bit (any
> write/write_compressed/bdrv_copy clear the bit, any trim clears the bit
> if the driver does not guarantee trim reads as zero, any truncate clears
> the bit if the driver does not guarantee truncate reads as zero, etc).
> Basically, the block layer would cache the results of .bdrv_known_zeroes
> during .bdrv_co_open, bdrv_co_pwrite() and friends would update that
> cache, and and bdrv_known_zeroes() would report the cached value rather
> than a fresh call to .bdrv_known_zeroes.

Sounds reasonable to me in generaly, but I’d prefer it to be fetched
on-demand rather than unconditionally in bdrv_open().

(I realize that this means a tri-state of “known false”, “known true”,
and “not yet queried”.)

> Are we worried enough about clients of this interface to make the block
> layer more robust?  (From the maintenance standpoint, the more the block
> layer guarantees, the easier it is to write code that uses the block
> layer; but there is the counter-argument that making the block layer
> track whether an image has been modified means a [slight] penalty to
> every write request to update the boolean.)

Just like Vladimir, I’m worried about repeating the same mistakes we
have before: That is, most places that called bdrv_has_zero_init() just
did so out of wishful thinking, hoping that it would do what they need
it to.  It didn’t.

Max