With the recent talk of the trim SATA instruction becoming supported in
the upcoming versions of Windows and claims from Intel that support for
it in their SSDs is imminent, it occurs to me that this would be equally
useful in virtual disk emulation.
Since the disk image is a sparse file, it always only grows, and
eventually it will grow to it's full intended size even if the actual
used space is a small fraction of the container size. Since the trim
instruction tells the disk that a particular block is no longer used
(and can thus be scheduled for erasing as and when required), the same
thing could be used to reclaim space used by sparse files backing the
VM. It would allow for higher overcommit of disk usage on VM farms.
Is this feature likely to be available in KVM soon?
Gordan
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