Thomas Glanzmann wrote: > If you don't intend to have such an optional feature in ext3/ext4 I > would like to know if you know a tool that makes it possible to zero out > unused blocks? > > The only reference that I found for such a tool for Linux is the > following: > Astounding use of backquote. I'm not sure about the "percent" bit. I think it's some confusion over only 95% of total blocks being available for allocation. I, too, would not recommend it, but it becomes safer by repeatedly allocating only half the remaining disk, stopping when there's only a few blocks free, to leave some for all of the other processes. Presumably it won't be a problem having (potentially) a few free blocks that don't de-duplicate. #!/bin/bash FileSystem=`grep ext /etc/mtab| awk -F" " '{ print $2 }'` for i in $FileSystem do while number=`df -B 512 $i | awk -F" " '$4 < 10 {exit(1)} {print $4 / 2}'` do dd count=$number if=/dev/zero || break done > $i/zf rm -f $i/zf done Are you proposing to de-duplicate a live filesystem? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html