KVM: Don't pre-reserve xarray entries when storing empty/NULL attributesgrafted

Skip the xarray reservation loop when clearing all memory attributes, as
storing NULL only erases the entry and never needs to allocate, so no
reservation (and no cleanup of a failed one) is required in that case.

Suggested-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
Cc: David Ballesteros <davimaba.v@proton.me>
Signed-off-by: Zeng Chi <zengchi@kylinos.cn>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260921102442.1232375-1-zeng_chi911@163.com
[sean: split to separate patch]
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>

1 files changed, 34 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..976a180b2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+Bigalloc
+--------
+
+At the moment, the default size of a block is 4KiB, which is a commonly
+supported page size on most MMU-capable hardware. This is fortunate, as
+ext4 code is not prepared to handle the case where the block size
+exceeds the page size. However, for a filesystem of mostly huge files,
+it is desirable to be able to allocate disk blocks in units of multiple
+blocks to reduce both fragmentation and metadata overhead. The
+bigalloc feature provides exactly this ability.
+
+The bigalloc feature (EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_BIGALLOC) changes ext4 to
+use clustered allocation, so that each bit in the ext4 block allocation
+bitmap addresses a power of two number of blocks. For example, if the
+file system is mainly going to be storing large files in the 4-32
+megabyte range, it might make sense to set a cluster size of 1 megabyte.
+This means that each bit in the block allocation bitmap now addresses
+256 4k blocks. This shrinks the total size of the block allocation
+bitmaps for a 2T file system from 64 megabytes to 256 kilobytes. It also
+means that a block group addresses 32 gigabytes instead of 128 megabytes,
+also shrinking the amount of file system overhead for metadata.
+
+The administrator can set a block cluster size at mkfs time (which is
+stored in the s_log_cluster_size field in the superblock); from then
+on, the block bitmaps track clusters, not individual blocks. This means
+that block groups can be several gigabytes in size (instead of just
+128MiB); however, the minimum allocation unit becomes a cluster, not a
+block, even for directories. TaoBao had a patchset to extend the “use
+units of clusters instead of blocks” to the extent tree, though it is
+not clear where those patches went-- they eventually morphed into
+“extent tree v2” but that code has not landed as of May 2015.
+