[Libguestfs] Defrag guest fs

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 12:12:58PM +0100, Olivier Hault wrote:
> For a while, I wonder if it would be possible to defrag guest fs
> from the host.  I can see two flavors a) offline defrag, b) online
> defrag of the guest fs
>
> I there already solutions of works in progress to support those
> operations ?

We don't support this right now.  However it is certainly something we
would support.

libguestfs implements features by running already available Linux
tools.  eg. "guestfs_zerofree" is implemented by running the
"zerofree" command.

Therefore the concrete steps to supporting this are:

(1) What commands exist already in Fedora/Debian to defrag the
different types of filesystems?  (vfat, ntfs, ext3, ...)

(2) What open source Linux programs exist to do this which could be
packaged for Fedora/Debian?

(3) Begin the process of packaging (2) for Fedora and/or Debian:
    http://join.fedoraproject.org/
    http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

(4) Add the libguestfs wrapper for these commands.  This step is
generally very simple once (1)-(3) above have been sorted out.

So that's what is needed, and any help you can give would be welcome.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v