When using a memory-backend object with prealloc turned on, QEMU will memset() the first byte in every memory page to zero. While this might have been acceptable for memory backends associated with RAM, this corrupts application data for NVDIMMs.
Instead of setting every page to zero, read the current byte value and then just write that same value back, so we are not corrupting the original data. Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrange <berra...@redhat.com> --- I'm unclear if this is actually still safe in practice ? Is the compiler permitted to optimize away the read+write since it doesn't change the memory value. I'd hope not, but I've been surprised before... IMHO this is another factor in favour of requesting an API from the kernel to provide the prealloc behaviour we want. util/oslib-posix.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/util/oslib-posix.c b/util/oslib-posix.c index 35012b9..8f5b656 100644 --- a/util/oslib-posix.c +++ b/util/oslib-posix.c @@ -355,7 +355,8 @@ void os_mem_prealloc(int fd, char *area, size_t memory, Error **errp) /* MAP_POPULATE silently ignores failures */ for (i = 0; i < numpages; i++) { - memset(area + (hpagesize * i), 0, 1); + char val = *(area + (hpagesize * i)); + memset(area + (hpagesize * i), 0, val); } } -- 2.9.3