[libvirt] libvirt needs to dynamically support kvm-img and/or qemu-img

[Doug Goldstein]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Doug Goldstein <cardoe at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:04:55AM -0500, Doug Goldstein wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>>
>> I don't much like this function with the mix of fixe length buffers,
>> and fixed length malloc()'s.  I think it'd be better to split out the
>> code for breaking $PATH into a list of strings into a separate function,
>> eg
>>
>>    int virSplitPath(const char *src, const char **dst);
>>
>> So it'd take the $PATH value, and return a list of strings in 'dst', and
>> the number of strins as the return value.
>>
>> Then the virFindFileInPath() method, would be better to iterate over
>> this, and use virAsprintf() to build the full path, rather than
>> relying on fixed size buffers.
>>
>
> The point of using the fixed length buffer is for memory
> fragmentation. While I will agree that it may be confusing at first
> glance, the point is that libvirtd is a long running daemon and in a
> short term scope a little extra memory usage is acceptable than to
> fragment the memory space slowly over time. Since the scope of the
> first variable is just the scope of the function, a fixed length
> buffer is simply just some room on the stack and its gone once the
> function is out of scope. The return value is just allocated once and
> returned.
>
> Implementing the pure allocation method as described above would
> result in an unnecessary amount of small allocations. One for the char
> array. One per each piece of path (on Fedora 10 there are 10
> components to a default install in $PATH). Then one for path piece +
> binary name. This would result in 21 allocations per call. That's a
> lot of memory churn for a short running piece of code.
>
> --
> Doug Goldstein
>

Here's v2 of the patch. Changed to use goto and VIR_ALLOC/FREE

-- 
Doug Goldstein
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