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The return of SEEK_HOLEThe return of SEEK_HOLEPosted May 8, 2011 14:58 UTC (Sun) by guest (guest, #2027)Parent article: The return of SEEK_HOLE
Just drop support for holy (sic) files!
The small benefit they give doesn't justify the problems they produce.
Has anyone actually measured how many holey files are in a typical fs and how big the holes are?
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The return of SEEK_HOLE Posted May 9, 2011 1:11 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Well, there's at least one use for them: some machines I've used have had a terrabyte-long /var/log/lastlog file, due to uid -1 being inserted in it, or something like that. It would've been a shame if that actually took a terrabyte of disk space (although that's actually feasible now!). :)
Of course, on the problems side, this caused havoc with RPM, since under some conditions I don't really understand, it would try to read and checksum the entire file, every time you tried to install a package. But hey, just need to teach RPM about SEEK_HOLE, and it'll be all great!
The return of SEEK_HOLE Posted May 11, 2011 21:34 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Other major holey files include quotas, coredumps, and some sorts of disk image (including, the biggie, virtual machine disk images). Of course there are virtual machine disk image formats that do *not* require holes, but either they allocate a lot of space right off or they basically have to reimplement holes at a higher level...
The return of SEEK_HOLE Posted Nov 11, 2011 14:54 UTC (Fri) by johnflux (subscriber, #58833) [Link]
Torrents use them a lot.
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