Bug 1140250

Since it had been a bit since I looked at this 'issue' and the libvirt bug is still on my 7.1 list, I figured I'd revisit this to see if perhaps I missed anything or even misunderstood something.

As I relooked at the results - I can see the posix_fallocate code apparently writing 10 1 MiB buffers to the file, which seems to be what's desired; however, it's how that data is interpreted by tools afterwards that seems to be the issue here.  For example, 'du -h' shows a different size than say 'ls -al' on the resulting file:

# du -h /home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2
44K	/home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2
# ls -al /home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2
-rw-------. 1 root root 10485760 Dec  9 07:23 test_vol2
#

The following is output of a program that essentially calls stat and statfs on the target file and provides/prints information from the various fields.  

For the posix_fallocate'd file, the following is displayed:

# /home/jferlan/exmplCode/stat /home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2
Open '/home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2' for stat
stat st_blocks=88 st_blksize=1048576 st_size=10485760
statfs f_bsize=1048576 f_blocks=137675 f_bfree=95786 f_bavail=88770
lseek end=10485760
#

If I change the creation of the file to a different method that writes 1MiB buffers to the file in a loop using write instead of posix_fallocate, I get the following afterwards:

# /home/jferlan/exmplCode/stat /home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2
Open '/home/nfs_pool/target/test_vol2' for stat
stat st_blocks=20480 st_blksize=1048576 st_size=10485760
statfs f_bsize=1048576 f_blocks=137675 f_bfree=95798 f_bavail=88782
lseek end=10485760
#


The "st_blocks" is what is used by du and libvirt to determine the size of the file.  From the man page:

       The st_blocks field indicates the number of blocks allocated to the
       file, 512-byte units.  (This may be smaller than st_size/512 when the
       file has holes.)

That naturally explains "the math" of "st_blocks * 512" to determine the size of the file in MiB (eg 88 * 512 / 1024 = 44 MiB).

Still not sure why/how the st_blocks gets set to 88, but whatever does that is the root cause of this problem.  The 88 even seems to be a bit of a problem - I could see perhaps if was 80 which would be 80 * 512 * 256 = 10485760, but the 88 seems to be an "off by 1 error". 

Another datapoint 1048576 (eg wsize) / 256 = 4096, where 4096 is the blocksize of the mount point parent directory (in my case /home, /home/nfs_pool) as well as the size of the 'nfs-export' directory even though the 'target' directory uses a blocksize 1048576:

(statfs is my simple code that just calls statfs and displays data)

# ./statfs /home
statfs f_bsize=4096 f_blocks=35244766 f_bfree=24517830 f_bavail=22721734
# ./statfs /home/nfs_pool
statfs f_bsize=4096 f_blocks=35244766 f_bfree=24517862 f_bavail=22721766
# ./statfs /home/nfs_pool/nfs-export
statfs f_bsize=4096 f_blocks=35244766 f_bfree=24517740 f_bavail=22721644
# ./statfs /home/nfs_pool/target
statfs f_bsize=1048576 f_blocks=137675 f_bfree=95773 f_bavail=88757
#
# ls -al /home/nfs_pool
total 10260
drwxr-xr-x.  4 root root     4096 Jul 31 17:12 .
drwxr-xr-x. 26 root root     4096 Dec  1 14:22 ..
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root     4096 Dec  9 07:23 nfs-export
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root     4096 Dec  9 07:23 target
#

I proposed an upstream patch addressing this (among other things): https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-05/msg00321.html

Fix has been committed upstream: https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=glibc.git;h=7fe9e2e089f4990b7d18d0798f591ab276b15f2b

Reproduced on s390x, aarch64 and x86_64. Not reproduced on ppc64, ppc64le unknown.

The NEW glibc-2.17-156.el7 passed on all architectures.

VERIFIED.

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-2573.html