On 08/09/2011 06:52 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Hi all,
This is something I've wanted to see for a very long time, and it
finally occurred to me that perhaps I should say something about it!
It would be a very nice thing to have a flag to e2fsck, presumably -z,
to zero out any unused data blocks, inodes and so on. The goal is to
minimize the amount of space required after compressing a virtual disk
image or similar, and to make sure any non-data isn't lying around.
-hpa
Do you need it to be in the fsck tool?
If you have a sparsely allocated block map under your file system, doing a zero
of all blocks could add hours for a big, slow S-ATA drives (2-3 hours for a 1TB
drive).
An alternative for SSD's and devices that do TRIM/UNMAP would be to use one of
the batched discard tools (that would make discarded data read back as zeroed).
Thanks!
Ric
--
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
