On 2011-02-06, at 4:49, [email protected] wrote: > Currently, tar seems to perform quite sub-optimally when archiving sparse > files. I compared the performance of GNU tar and star when archiving a > large (~2TB) sparse file. All but about 180MB of the file was holes.
There was a patch posted a while ago by Bernd Schubert to detect completely sparse files, bit I don't know if there was anything to automatically handle partially sparse files. > Sometimes it's possible to determine the exact hole layout in a file. > Apparently that's quite easy in Solaris (SEEK_HOLE, SEEK_DATA) and > Windows, less so in Linux (FIEMAP). A question to the tar maintainers - if someone were to write support for FIEMAP detecting holes on Linux would this be acceptable to include upstream? Cheers, Andreas
