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qemu-img convert vs writing another copy tool
From: |
Richard W.M. Jones |
Subject: |
qemu-img convert vs writing another copy tool |
Date: |
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 18:35:00 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) |
I guess some people are aware that virt-v2v, which is a tool which
converts guests from VMware to run on KVM, and some other
OpenStack-OpenStack migration tools we have, use "qemu-img convert" to
copy the data around.
Historically we've had bugs here. The most recent was discussed in
the thread on this list called "Bug? qemu-img convert to preallocated
image makes it sparse"
(https://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg60479.html)
We've been kicking around the idea of writing some alternate tool. My
proposal would be a tool (not yet written, maybe it will never be
written) called nbdcp for copying between NBD servers and local files.
An outline manual page for this proposed tool is attached.
Some of the things which this tool might do which qemu-img convert
cannot do right now:
- Hint that the target already contains zeroes. It's almost always
the case that we know this, but we cannot tell qemu. This was the
cause of a big performance regression last year.
- Declare that we want the target to be either sparse or
preallocated. qemu-img convert can sort of do this in a
round-about way (create the target in advance and use the -n
option), but also it's broken at the moment.
- NBD multi-conn. In my tests this makes a really massive
performance difference in certain situations. Again, virt-v2v has
a lot of information that we cannot pass to qemu: we know, for
example, exactly if the server supports the feature, how many
threads are available, in some situations even have information
about the network and backing disks that the data will travel over
/ be stored on.
- Machine-parsable progress bars. You can, sort of, parse the
progress bar from qemu-img convert, but it's not as easy as it
could be. In particular it would be nice if the format was treated
as ABI, and if there was a way to have the tool write the progress
bar info to a precreated file descriptor.
- External block lists. This is a rather obscure requirement, but
it's necessary in the case where we can get the allocated block map
from another source (eg. pyvmomi) and then want to use that with an
NBD source that does not support extents (eg. nbdkit-ssh-plugin /
libssh / sftp). [Having said that, it may be possible to implement
this as an nbdkit filter, so maybe this is not a blocking feature.]
One thing which qemu-img convert can do which nbdcp could not:
- Read or write from qcow2 files.
So instead of splitting the ecosystem and writing a new tool that
doesn't do as much as qemu-img convert, I wonder what qemu developers
think about the above missing features? For example, are they in
scope for qemu-img convert?
Rich.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
nbdcp(1) LIBNBD nbdcp(1)
NAME
nbdcp - copy between NBD servers and local files
SYNOPSIS
nbdcp [-a|--target-allocation allocated|sparse]
[-b|--block-list <blocksfile>]
[-m|--multi-conn <n>] [-M|--multi-conn-target <n>]
[-p|--progress-bar] [-S|--sparse-detect <n>]
[-T|--threads <n>] [-z|--target-is-zero]
'nbd://...'|DISK.IMG 'nbd://...'|DISK.IMG
DESCRIPTION
nbdcp is a utility that can copy quickly between NBD servers and local
raw format files (or block devices). It can copy:
from NBD server to file (or block device)
For example, this command copies from the NBD server listening on
port 10809 on "example.com" to a local file called disk.img:
nbdcp nbd://example.com disk.img
from file (or block device) to NBD server
For example, this command copies from a local block device /dev/sda
to the NBD server listening on Unix domain socket /tmp/socket:
nbdcp /dev/sda 'nbd+unix:///?socket=/tmp/socket'
from NBD server to NBD server
For example this copies between two different exports on the same
NBD server:
nbdcp nbd://example.com/export1 nbd://example.com/export2
This program cannot: copy from file to file (use cp(1) or dd(1)), copy
to or from formats other than raw (use qemu-img(1) convert), or access
servers other than NBD servers (also use qemu-img(1)).
NBD servers are specified by their URI, following the NBD URI standard
at https://github.com/NetworkBlockDevice/nbd/blob/master/doc/uri.md
Controlling sparseness or preallocation in the target
The options -a (--target-allocation), -S (--sparse-detect) and -z
(--target-is-zero) together control sparseness in the target file.
By default nbdcp tries to both preserve sparseness from the source and
will detect runs of allocated zeroes and turn them into sparseness. To
turn off detection of sparseness use "-S 0".
The -z option should be used if and only if you know that the target
block device is zeroed already. This allows an important optimization
where nbdcp can skip zeroing or trimming parts of the disk that are
already zero.
The -a option is used to control the desired final preallocation state
of the target. The default is "-a sparse" which makes the target as
sparse as possible. "-a allocated" makes the target fully allocated.
OPTIONS
--help
Display brief command line help and exit.
-a allocated
--target-allocation=allocated
Make the target fully allocated.
-a sparse
--target-allocation=sparse
Make the target as sparse as possible. This is the default. See
also "Controlling sparseness or preallocation in the target".
-b BLOCKSFILE
--block-list=BLOCKSFILE
Load the list of extents from an external file. nbdcp considers
this to be the truth for source extents. The file should contain
one record per line in the same format as nbdkit-sh-plugin(1), ie:
offset length type
with "offset" and "length" in bytes, and the "type" field being a
comma-separated list of the words "hole" and "zero". For example:
0 1M
1M 9M hole,zero
Any parts of the source which don't have descriptions are assumed
to be of type "hole,zero".
-m N
--multi-conn=N
Enable NBD multi-conn with up to "N" connections. Only some NBD
servers support this but it can greatly improve performance.
The default is to enable multi-conn if we detect that the server
supports it, with up to 4 connections.
-M N
--multi-conn-target=N
If you are copying between NBD servers, use -m to control the
multi-conn setting for the source server, and this option (-M) to
control the multi-conn setting for the target server.
-p
--progress-bar
Display a progress bar during copying.
-p machine:FD
--progress-bar=machine:FD
Write a machine-readable progress bar to file descriptor "FD".
This progress bar prints lines with the format "COPIED/TOTAL"
(where "COPIED" and "TOTAL" are 64 bit unsigned integers).
-S 0
--sparse-detect=0
Turn off sparseness detection.
-S N
--sparse-detect=N
Detect runs of zero bytes of at least size "N" bytes and turn them
into sparse blocks on the target (if "-a sparse" is used). This is
the default, with a 512 byte block size.
-T N
--threads N
Use at most "N" threads when copying. Usually more threads leads
to better performance, up to the limit of the number of cores on
your machine and the parallelism of the underlying disk or network.
The default is to use the number of online processors.
-z
--target-is-zero
Declare that the target block device contains only zero bytes (or
sparseness that reads back as zeroes). You must only use this
option if you are sure that this is true, since it means that nbdcp
will enable an optimization where it skips zeroing parts of the
disk that are zero on the source.
-V
--version
Display the package name and version and exit.
SEE ALSO
qemu-img(1), libnbd(3), nbdsh(1).
AUTHORS
Richard W.M. Jones
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2020 Red Hat Inc.
LICENSE
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301 USA
libnbd-1.3.1 2020-01-23 nbdcp(1)
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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- qemu-img convert vs writing another copy tool,
Richard W.M. Jones <=