I want to recreate a dynamically allocated qcow2 image in order to shrink it. Is it sufficient that all unnecessary files have been deleted, or do I also need to fill the space formerly occupied by those files with zeros? In other words, is qemu-img filesystem-aware?
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Yes, you do need to zero-fill the filesystem if you want to recover the space used by deleted files. And no, qemu-img isn't fs-aware. I forgot to do this for one VM image I created today (a minimal Debian Sid image for my openstack cloud at work) and it ended up being almost 900MB, even with "-c" for qcow2 compression. I recreated it after running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/zero ; rm -f /root/zero ; shutdown -h now", and the image size shrunk down to about 335MB. That's a lot less (worthless) data to copy around whenever I start up a new instance. there were a lot of deleted files, because the VM started out as debian squeeze and was apt-get upgraded to sid. |
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