On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 12:12:13PM +1100, Ross McKay wrote: > John Wong wrote: > > >I create the 30G qcow2 image file, installed winxp, winxp show me the > >harddisk used 5G, but the image file size is 12G now. > >can i shrink the image file size? how? > >my kvm version is: "kvm-84", qemu version is: "0.9.1". > >please help, thank you. > > In addition to what the others said, you might be able to reclaim some > space by running qemu-img convert. If you tell it to compress, it will > certainly reduce the image file size, perhaps with a little loss in > performance. The problem there is that qemu-img convert will only save space where the blocks are zeroes, and most filesystems don't zero blocks when they're freed, so not much space is actually saved. I'm working on a tool at the moment that understands various filesystem formats and doesn't copy the non-zero freed blocks either. It's only working for swap partitions at the moment, but once I get up to speed on how ext2/3 works I'll have that sorted. I guess I should announce it here once I get ext2 support working now that there are people here who care... - Matt -- MacOS X ... [is] enough of a bother to luse it if you've progressed past the "ooh, click on the shiny little picture!" stage, if you try to treat it as a serious OS, then it really gets out the little tricycle wheels and the toy horn that goes "onk! onk!" -- Dave Brown, ASR -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
