Discard=Unmap on Virtio Disks


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I ran across an article whose author claimed that on recent versions of qemu,  discard=unmap was functional on virtio disks.  So I did some testing.

 

I have not run all permutations, but have tested:

  Unraid 6.9.2

  UEFI and Seabios VMs

  Q35-5.1 and i440fx-5.1 VMs

  Windows 10 and Windows 11 with the latest virtio drivers, virtio-win-0.1.196.iso

  Ubuntu 21.4

  raw and qcow2 vdisks

  vdisks on XFS and BTRFS disks

  vdisks with and without the copy-on-write attribute set

 

In all cases, the virtio disk was functionally equivalent to a virtio-scsi disk.  On file deletion, windows unmapped blocks immediately.  Linux unmapped blocks after running fstrim.

 

https://chrisirwin.ca/posts/discard-with-kvm-2020

Edited by aim60
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