Bug 2236504

Summary: [qemu-kvm] Enable zstd support for qcow2 files
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Reporter: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones>
Component: qemu-kvmAssignee: Kevin Wolf <kwolf>
qemu-kvm sub component: qcow2 QA Contact: Tingting Mao <timao>
Status: CLOSED MIGRATED Docs Contact:
Severity: medium    
Priority: medium CC: aliang, coli, jinzhao, juzhang, kwolf, quintela, rjones, timao, vgoyal, virt-maint, ymankad
Version: 9.4Keywords: MigratedToJIRA, RFE, Triaged
Target Milestone: rcFlags: pm-rhel: mirror+
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Hardware: Unspecified   
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Last Closed: 2023-09-22 16:31:49 UTC Type: Bug
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Richard W.M. Jones 2023-08-31 13:35:13 UTC
Description of problem:

qcow2 supports compressed images.  The default is zlib, but zstd is
also supported upstream.  However zstd compression is not enabled
in RHEL qemu-kvm at all, meaning that we cannot create, open etc
qcow2 zstd-compressed images.

Fedora and other distributions may switch to zstd compression for
qcow2, and this will create an interoperability issue in future.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

qemu-img-8.0.0-7.el9.x86_64

How reproducible:

100%

Steps to Reproduce:

$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 test.qcow2 1G -o compression_type=zstd
Formatting 'test.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zstd size=1073741824 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16
qemu-img: test.qcow2: Parameter 'compression-type' does not accept value 'zstd'

On Fedora this works:

$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 test.qcow2 1G -o compression_type=zstd
Formatting 'test.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zstd size=1073741824 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16

Comment 1 Richard W.M. Jones 2023-08-31 13:36:30 UTC
The change to the spec file is trivial, just use:

--enable-zstd

However there is an issue that this enables zstd-compressed live migration
support, which we do not wish to support (although zlib-compressed live
migration is already enabled and unsupported).

Comment 2 Vivek Goyal 2023-09-05 18:57:13 UTC
Kevin WDYT? I am wondering that is it worth taking extra maintenance burden at this point of time. Who is planning to create and distribute zstd compressed images.

Comment 3 RHEL Program Management 2023-09-22 16:29:11 UTC
Issue migration from Bugzilla to Jira is in process at this time. This will be the last message in Jira copied from the Bugzilla bug.

Comment 4 Red Hat Bugzilla 2024-01-21 04:26:07 UTC
The needinfo request[s] on this closed bug have been removed as they have been unresolved for 120 days