Hi folks, I have been studying QCOW2 file format for a couple of days, and I am a little bit confused about whether QCOW2 supports UNMAP or not. As I surf through internet, some mailing list discussion had mentioned that qemu-nbd and nbd module both support UNMAP command. So I follow the steps below on my machine (Ubuntu 13.10 with linux kernel 3.12) to test if qemu-nbd and QCOW2 do support UNMAP.
1. Create a qcow2 file via qemu-img > sudo qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o cluster_size=524288 base.qcow2 1G 2. Connect this qcow2 file with qemu-nbd > sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 base.qcow2 --discard=unmap 3. Use sg_unmap command to issue UNMAP command to this NBD > sudo sg_unmap --lba=0 --num=1 /dev/nbd0 Everytime I get the following error message: unmap cdb: 42 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 18 00 unmap: pass through os error: Inappropriate ioctl for device UNMAP failed (use '-v' to get more information) I also try to format this nbd device with EXT4 and mount it, but still cannot perform fstrim on the mount point. Have I done anything wrong? Any help would be grateful. Thanks. Best Regards, Dennis