Guest Discard/FSTRIM On Thin LVs

In my last post I showed how to recover space from disk images backed by sparse files. As a small addition I’d like to also show how to do the same with a guest disk image that is backed by a thinly provisioned Logical Volume.

First things first, I modified the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file to have the issue_discards = 1 option set. I’m not 100% sure this is needed but I did it at the time so I wanted to include it here.

Next I created a new VG (vgthin) out of a spare partition and then created an thin LV pool (lvthinpool) inside the VG. Finally I created a thin LV within the pool (lvthin). This is all shown below:
\

[root@host ~]# vgcreate vgthin /dev/sda3
  Volume group "vgthin" successfully created
[root@host ~]# lvcreate --thinpool lvthinpool --size 20G vgthin
  Logical volume "lvthinpool" created
[root@host ~]# 
[root@host ~]# lvcreate --name lvthin --virtualsize 10G --thin vgthin/lvthinpool
  Logical volume "lvthin" created

To observe the usages of the thin LV and the thin pool you can use the lvs command and take note of the Data% column:
\

[root@host ~]# lvs vgthin
  LV         VG     Attr      LSize  Pool       Origin Data%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  lvthin     vgthin Vwi-aotz- 10.00g lvthinpool          0.00                        
  lvthinpool vgthin twi-a-tz- 20.00g                     0.00

Next I needed to add the disk to the guest. I did it using the following xml and virsh command. Note from my previous post that the scsi controller inside of my guest is a virtio-scsi controller and that I am adding the discard='unmap' option.
\

[root@host ~]# cat <<EOF > /tmp/thinLV.xml 
    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' discard='unmap'/>
      <source dev='/dev/vgthin/lvthin'/>
      <target dev='sdb' bus='scsi'/>
    </disk>
EOF
[root@host ~]#
[root@host ~]# virsh attach-device Fedora19 /tmp/thinLV.xml --config 
...

After a quick power cycle of the guest I then created a filesystem on the new disk (sdb) and mounted it within the guest.
\

[root@guest ~]# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb 
...
[root@guest ~]# 
[root@guest ~]# mount /dev/sdb /mnt/

Same as last time, I then copied a large file into the guest. After I did so you can see from the lvs output that the thin LV is now using 11% of its allotted space within the pool.
\

[root@host ~]# lvs vgthin
  LV         VG     Attr      LSize  Pool       Origin Data%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  lvthin     vgthin Vwi-aotz- 10.00g lvthinpool          1.34                        
  lvthinpool vgthin twi-a-tz- 20.00g
[root@host ~]# 
[root@host ~]# scp /tmp/code.tar.gz root@192.168.100.136:/mnt/
root@192.168.100.136's password: 
code.tar.gz                        100% 1134MB  29.8MB/s   00:38     
[root@host ~]# 
[root@host ~]# lvs vgthin
  LV         VG     Attr      LSize  Pool       Origin Data%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  lvthin     vgthin Vwi-aotz- 10.00g lvthinpool         11.02                        
  lvthinpool vgthin twi-a-tz- 20.00g

It was then time for a little TRIM action:
\

[root@guest ~]# df -kh /mnt/
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb        9.8G  1.2G  8.1G  13% /mnt
[root@guest ~]# 
[root@guest ~]# 
[root@guest ~]# rm /mnt/code.tar.gz 
rm: remove regular file ‘/mnt/code.tar.gz’? y
[root@guest ~]# 
[root@guest ~]# df -kh /mnt/
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb        9.8G   23M  9.2G   1% /mnt
[root@guest ~]# fstrim -v /mnt/
/mnt/: 1.2 GiB (1329049600 bytes) trimmed

And from within the host we can see that the utilization of the thin LV has appropriately dwindled back down to ~2.85%
\

[root@host ~]# lvs vgthin
  LV         VG     Attr      LSize  Pool       Origin Data%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  lvthin     vgthin Vwi-aotz- 10.00g lvthinpool          2.85                        
  lvthinpool vgthin twi-a-tz- 20.00g                     1.42

Again I have posted my full guest libvirt XML here.

Dusty

PS See here for a more thorough example of creating thin LVs.