[Gllug] Reiserfs faster boot

[Simon Trimmer]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Alain Williams wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, if it's layered on top of a filesystem you shouldn't be worrying about
how it arranges data on disk, just that when you do the VFS operations on it
you get the correct data (when you restore the backup the data is going to be
arranged differently, and I'd dismiss the cpu hog argument as tar doesn't
have QOS it will run to the best of it's ability)

-Simon
Simon Trimmer <simon at urbanmyth.org>


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