Re: [Libguestfs] Intent to retire: zerofree
Rich,
Thanks for packaging zerofree. It's been great to be able to install
my own software without having to build it.
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
zerofree is a package that can take an ext2 (only?) filesystem, work
out what parts of the filesystem are not used, and either zero them or
sparsify them.
It works for ext2, ext3 and ext4. It zeros free blocks; sparsifying
is a different issue.
There's also a more serious data safety issue: Although this
probably
works OK for ext2 since that format is frozen in time, it probably
corrupts ext4 filesystems containing features that it doesn't know
about.
To the best of my knowledge it does not corrupt ext4 filesystems.
The only thing zerofree cares about is free blocks. Filesystem
features that affect files, directories or inodes are irrelevant to
zerofree.
zerofree get its information about free blocks from the ext2fs library.
However free blocks may be represented on disk the library provides the
abstraction necessary to access them.
I feel that supporting something which has been rejected by the
e2fsprogs community is difficult, especially when it concerns data
integrity.
I don't consider zerofree to have been rejected by the e2fsprogs
community. Due to my fear of rejection it has never been submitted for
their consideration.
Ron