Since commit c8bb23cb when a write
request results in a new allocation QEMU first tries to see if the
rest of the cluster outside the written area contains only zeroes.

In that case, instead of doing a normal copy-on-write operation and
writing explicit zero buffers to disk, the code zeroes the whole
cluster efficiently using pwrite_zeroes() with BDRV_REQ_NO_FALLBACK.

This improves performance very significantly but it only happens when
we are writing to an area that was completely unallocated before. Zero
clusters (QCOW2_CLUSTER_ZERO_*) are treated like normal clusters and
are therefore slower to allocate.

This happens because the code uses bdrv_is_allocated_above() rather
bdrv_block_status_above(). The former is not as accurate for this
purpose but it is faster. However in the case of qcow2 the underlying
call does already report zero clusters just fine so there is no reason
why we cannot use that information.

After testing 4KB writes on an image that only contains zero clusters
this patch results in almost five times more IOPS.

Signed-off-by: Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>
Reviewed-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <vsementsov@virtuozzo.com>
Message-Id: <6d77cab968c501c44d6e1089b9bc91b04170b49e.1603731354.git.berto@igalia.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>