From 4dc822d726376fd4369089f04eb8605d2f94b74f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: aliguori Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 21:39:21 +0000 Subject: Use writeback caching by default with qcow2 qcow2 writes a cluster reference count on every cluster update. This causes performance to crater when using anything but cache=writeback. This is most noticeable when using savevm. Right now, qcow2 isn't a reliable format regardless of the type of cache your using because metadata is not updated in the correct order. Considering this, I think it's somewhat reasonable to use writeback caching by default with qcow2 files. It at least avoids the massive performance regression for users until we sort out the issues in qcow2. Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori git-svn-id: svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/qemu/trunk@5879 c046a42c-6fe2-441c-8c8c-71466251a162 --- qemu-doc.texi | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) (limited to 'qemu-doc.texi') diff --git a/qemu-doc.texi b/qemu-doc.texi index f2c56ce0e0..77170d3ad6 100644 --- a/qemu-doc.texi +++ b/qemu-doc.texi @@ -289,6 +289,12 @@ The host page can be avoided entirely with @option{cache=none}. This will attempt to do disk IO directly to the guests memory. QEMU may still perform an internal copy of the data. +Some block drivers perform badly with @option{cache=writethrough}, most notably, +qcow2. If performance is more important than correctness, +@option{cache=writeback} should be used with qcow2. By default, if no explicit +caching is specified for a qcow2 disk image, @option{cache=writeback} will be +used. For all other disk types, @option{cache=writethrough} is the default. + Instead of @option{-cdrom} you can use: @example qemu -drive file=file,index=2,media=cdrom -- cgit v1.2.1