Re: [PATCH] qcow2: flush qcow2 l2 meta for new allocated clusters

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 05.08.2020 um 04:38 hat Ying Fang geschrieben:
> From: fangying <fangying1@huawei.com>
> 
> When qemu or qemu-nbd process uses a qcow2 image and configured with
> 'cache = none', it will write to the qcow2 image with a cache to cache
> L2 tables, however the process will not use L2 tables without explicitly
> calling the flush command or closing the mirror flash into the disk.
> Which may cause the disk data inconsistent with the written data for
> a long time. If an abnormal process exit occurs here, the issued written
> data will be lost.
> 
> Therefore, in order to keep data consistency we need to flush the changes
> to the L2 entry to the disk in time for the newly allocated cluster.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Ying Fang <fangying1@huawei.com>

If you want to have data safely written to the disk after each write
request, you need to use cache=writethrough/directsync (in other words,
aliases that are equivalent to setting -device ...,write-cache=off).
Note that this will have a major impact on write performance.

cache=none means bypassing the kernel page cache (O_DIRECT), but not
flushing after each write request.

Kevin