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On Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 08:15:51AM +0000, Sven Kieske wrote:

[...]

> Thanks for all the feedback and pointers! FWIW we were already aware
> of the discard=unmap option in libvirt, I should have mentioned that.
> 
> In the meantime I found this bugreport:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1672682
> 
> which seems to indicate that this indeed works in libvirt for
> virtio-blk.
> 
> So I will continue to figure out why this doesn't work as intended in
> our setup.

Yes, 'discard' support for 'virtio-blk' was added to Linux and QEMU in
the following versions:

    - Linux: v5.0 onwards
    - QEMU: v4.0.0

So make sure you have those versions at a minimum.  And as you've
discovered in the above Red Hat bugzilla, libvirt already has the config
option to enable 'discard'; and Nova has the config option too.

            * * *

Some notes on 'discard' (also called as 'trim') that I learnt from my
colleague Dan Berrangé:

  - To genuinely save storage space, you need to enable 'trim' at every
    single layer of the I/O stack -- guest, host, and storage server(s).

  - Even if the host storage doesn't support 'discard', it might still
    be useful to enable it for the guests -- it'll keep your qcow2 file
    size down by releasing unused clusters, so if you need to copy the
    qcow2 file to another host there will be less data needing copying.

  - If you're "thick-provisoning" your guests so that they will never
    trigger ENOSPC, then you don't want to enable 'discard'.

[...]

-- 
/kashyap