qcow2: Allow configuring the L2 slice size

Now that the code is ready to handle L2 slices we can finally add an
option to allow configuring their size.

An L2 slice is the portion of an L2 table that is read by the qcow2
cache. Until now the cache was always reading full L2 tables, and
since the L2 table size is equal to the cluster size this was not very
efficient with large clusters. Here's a more detailed explanation of
why it makes sense to have smaller cache entries in order to load L2
data:

   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-block/2017-09/msg00635.html

This patch introduces a new command-line option to the qcow2 driver
named l2-cache-entry-size (cf. l2-cache-size). The cache entry size
has the same restrictions as the cluster size: it must be a power of
two and it has the same range of allowed values, with the additional
requirement that it must not be larger than the cluster size.

The L2 cache entry size (L2 slice size) remains equal to the cluster
size for now by default, so this feature must be explicitly enabled.
Although my tests show that 4KB slices consistently improve
performance and give the best results, let's wait and make more tests
with different cluster sizes before deciding on an optimal default.

Now that the cache entry size is not necessarily equal to the cluster
size we need to reflect that in the MIN_L2_CACHE_SIZE documentation.
That minimum value is a requirement of the COW algorithm: we need to
read two L2 slices (and not two L2 tables) in order to do COW, see
l2_allocate() for the actual code.

Signed-off-by: Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>
Message-id: c73e5611ff4a9ec5d20de68a6c289553a13d2354.1517840877.git.berto@igalia.com
Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/qapi/block-core.json b/qapi/block-core.json
index 2c107823fe..5c5921bfb7 100644
--- a/qapi/block-core.json
+++ b/qapi/block-core.json
@@ -2521,6 +2521,11 @@
 # @l2-cache-size:         the maximum size of the L2 table cache in
 #                         bytes (since 2.2)
 #
+# @l2-cache-entry-size:   the size of each entry in the L2 cache in
+#                         bytes. It must be a power of two between 512
+#                         and the cluster size. The default value is
+#                         the cluster size (since 2.12)
+#
 # @refcount-cache-size:   the maximum size of the refcount block cache
 #                         in bytes (since 2.2)
 #
@@ -2542,6 +2547,7 @@
             '*overlap-check': 'Qcow2OverlapChecks',
             '*cache-size': 'int',
             '*l2-cache-size': 'int',
+            '*l2-cache-entry-size': 'int',
             '*refcount-cache-size': 'int',
             '*cache-clean-interval': 'int',
             '*encrypt': 'BlockdevQcow2Encryption' } }