block: Avoid unecessary drv->bdrv_getlength() calls

The block layer generally keeps the size of an image cached in
bs->total_sectors so that it doesn't have to perform expensive
operations to get the size whenever it needs it.

This doesn't work however when using a backend that can change its size
without qemu being aware of it, i.e. passthrough of removable media like
CD-ROMs or floppy disks. For this reason, the caching is disabled when a
removable device is used.

It is obvious that checking whether the _guest_ device has removable
media isn't the right thing to do when we want to know whether the size
of the host backend can change. To make things worse, non-top-level
BlockDriverStates never have any device attached, which makes qemu
assume they are removable, so drv->bdrv_getlength() is always called on
the protocol layer. In the case of raw-posix, this causes unnecessary
lseek() system calls, which turned out to be rather expensive.

This patch completely changes the logic and disables bs->total_sectors
caching only for certain block driver types, for which a size change is
expected: host_cdrom and host_floppy on POSIX, host_device on win32; also
the raw format in case it sits on top of one of these protocols, but in
the common case the nested bdrv_getlength() call on the protocol driver
will use the cache again and avoid an expensive drv->bdrv_getlength()
call.

Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/block/raw_bsd.c b/block/raw_bsd.c
index 0078c1baeb..2265dcc03f 100644
--- a/block/raw_bsd.c
+++ b/block/raw_bsd.c
@@ -178,6 +178,7 @@ static BlockDriver bdrv_raw = {
     .bdrv_co_get_block_status = &raw_co_get_block_status,
     .bdrv_truncate        = &raw_truncate,
     .bdrv_getlength       = &raw_getlength,
+    .has_variable_length  = true,
     .bdrv_get_info        = &raw_get_info,
     .bdrv_is_inserted     = &raw_is_inserted,
     .bdrv_media_changed   = &raw_media_changed,