It is my understanding (from several of the howto's, mainly the partitioning howto, i think), that ext2fs automagically does something similar. The way i understand it, it moves un-modified files to the beginning of the partition and packs them tight..the longer they are not modified, the closer to the beginning it moves them. i would assume there would be special treatment of immutable files, but thats only an assumption. It appears that ext2fs automatically does this defragmenting and optimizing with the normal buffering and cacheing facilities, so i would assume that reboots would defeat the whole process, due to the rapid flushing of the buffers. anyway, might check that out in the partitioning howto.. -- ======================================================================== Rocky McGaugh Atipa Linux Solutions Linux Systems Engineer www.atipa.com rocky@smluc.org rmcgaugh@atipa.com ======================================================================== On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Mike Kenzie wrote:
With MVS PDS's they have a compress utility to reclaim wasted space. My understanding is that it moves all the files back to the top of the partition, and eliminates the small gaps between them.
Does the linux EXT2 filesystem do this automatically?
Is there a problem with the free inode list containing too many small blocks and preventing a write?
I found a reference somewhere saying that you had to cp a partition every so often to reclaim this space.
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