On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 8:52 PM Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:

On 08/03/2018 02:28 PM, Nir Soffer wrote:
> File systems not supporting FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE yet fall back to manual
> zeroing.
>
> We can avoid this by combining two fallocate calls:
>
> fallocate(FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE)
> fallocate(0)
>
> Based on my tests this is much more efficient compared to manual
> zeroing. The idea came from this qemu patch:
> https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commit/1cdc3239f1bb
>

>
> Note: the image is sparse, but nbdkit creates a fully allocated image.
> This may be a bug in nbdkit or qemu-img.

Calling fallocate(0) forces allocation; so anything explicitly written
to 0 won't be sparse when this mode is used.

Sure, this is a poor mans replacement for ZERO_RANGE. I assume that

we want sparseness only when may_trim is set, which is the current

behavior before this patch.

With qemu-img the default is sparse, and using -o preallocation=falloc

make the image preallocated. It seems that we don't have a way to select

sparseness of the destination image in NBD, or maybe I'm missing something?

There's also a question of
whether your source file accurately reports holes to begin with (poor
tmpfs SEEK_HOLE performance is still a common problem). But I don't see
that as getting in the way of this patch going in.

Nir