Commits
Lukas Czerner committed dfaa2ef68e8
loop: add discard support for loop devices This commit adds discard support for loop devices. Discard is usually supported by SSD and thinly provisioned devices as a method for reclaiming unused space. This is no different than trying to reclaim back space which is not used by the file system on the image, but it still occupies space on the host file system. We can do the reclamation on file system which does support hole punching. So when discard request gets to the loop driver we can translate that to punch a hole to the underlying file, hence reclaim the free space. This is very useful for trimming down the size of the image to only what is really used by the file system on that image. Fstrim may be used for that purpose. It has been tested on ext4, xfs and btrfs with the image file systems ext4, ext3, xfs and btrfs. ext4, or ext6 image on ext4 file system has some problems but it seems that ext4 punch hole implementation is somewhat flawed and it is unrelated to this commit. Also this is a very good method of validating file systems punch hole implementation. Note that when encryption is used, discard support is disabled, because using it might leak some information useful for possible attacker. Signed-off-by: Lukas Czerner <lczerner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>