[Gllug] Reiserfs faster boot

Alain Williams addw at phcomp.co.uk
Tue Oct 9 10:28:33 UTC 2001


On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 10:40:41AM +0100, tet at accucard.com wrote:
> 
> >AFIR Sybase make use of holes - create database files with holes in, an utter 
> >pain to backup/restore with anything other than dump (which I dislike).
> 
> Both GNU tar and GNU cpio accept a --sparse flag, which I believe will do
> what you want.

How do these detect a hole ? From the manual page they ``write files with large blocks of zeros as 
sparse files'' - which implies that they read Mb of NUL bytes and just generate more efficient output.
This means that on restore you can't be sure of getting exactly the same file back.
It will also be a CPU hog as it eats the NULs.

-- 
Alain Williams

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