qcow2: implement lazy refcounts

Lazy refcounts is a performance optimization for qcow2 that postpones
refcount metadata updates and instead marks the image dirty.  In the
case of crash or power failure the image will be left in a dirty state
and repaired next time it is opened.

Reducing metadata I/O is important for cache=writethrough and
cache=directsync because these modes guarantee that data is on disk
after each write (hence we cannot take advantage of caching updates in
RAM).  Refcount metadata is not needed for guest->file block address
translation and therefore does not need to be on-disk at the time of
write completion - this is the motivation behind the lazy refcount
optimization.

The lazy refcount optimization must be enabled at image creation time:

  qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o compat=1.1,lazy_refcounts=on a.qcow2 10G
  qemu-system-x86_64 -drive if=virtio,file=a.qcow2,cache=writethrough

Update qemu-iotests 031 and 036 since the extension header size changes
when we add feature bit table entries.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/tests/qemu-iotests/036.out b/tests/qemu-iotests/036.out
index ca0fda13d3..063ca22d66 100644
--- a/tests/qemu-iotests/036.out
+++ b/tests/qemu-iotests/036.out
@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ header_length             104
 
 Header extension:
 magic                     0x6803f857
-length                    48
+length                    96
 data                      <binary>
 
 *** done