Re: ext3 zerofree option and RedHat back port?

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen redhat com>]

Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:13:20AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
>> Ulf Zimmermann wrote:
>>> Can anyone tell me if the zerofree option for ext3 has been back ported
>>> to RedHat EL4 or EL5?
>> there appears to be no backporting to do; it's a single .c file that
>> makes simple use (I assume...) of libext2...
>>
>> But no, it's not in Fedora, EPEL, or RHEL.  Builds fine on my rhel5 box.
>>
>> If you wanted to, you could be the maintainer for Fedora, and put it
>> into EPEL, which would make it available for RHEL :)
> 
> Or it would be roughly a 5 line change to e2image (3 for option
> parsing, 1 for the usage line, and 1 to the if statement in
> write_raw_image_file() :-) to add an option to extend the "raw dump"
> functionality to also dump the data blocks of files, at which point it
> would create a sparse file containing only the used blocks in the
> filesystem for you, automatically.
> 
>     	 	       		      	   - Ted

hey that sounds even better than a random collection of single-purpose
utilities!  ;)

(But I suppose the original util had the other useful purpose of
scrubbing free blocks even if you don't intend to compress the fs image...)

-Eric