wiping of unused space on ext3

Ron Yorston rmy at tigress.co.uk
Fri Sep 8 09:01:27 UTC 2006


"Mindaugas" <mind at bi.lt> wrote:
>  I was asked if it is possible to zero unused space in ext3 partition?

I have a couple of patches that add a zerofree mount option to ext2 and
ext3 filesystems.  The ext2 version is much better tested and more
complete:  it zeros all file data blocks, directory blocks and extended
attributes (though not inode data).  The ext3 patch only handles file
data, not metadata.

I've been meaning to submit these to LKML, but since you ask let's give
them an airing here first.

Since this is being copied to the CentOS mailing list I should point
out that I also have versions of the patches that apply cleanly to the
RHEL 4 kernel.  I don't have them to hand at the moment but if there's
any interest I can provide them later.

Some background information and other tools are on my website:

   http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/uml/index.html

Ron




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