Strange fragmentation in nearly empty filesystem

[Carsten Oberscheid]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 12:37:01PM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> 
> It's possible that vmware changed too, I suppose.  If it's leaving holes
> now, you won't get back to one extent.

Point taken.

> How hard would it be to boot a kernel from a year ago, with your current
> vmware, and see how that goes - it might be an interesting test.

Indeed. Unfortunately, since this is my office desktop PC, I'm quite
reluctant to fiddle around with it too much. But perhaps I find an
older live CD to try this with.

> I'd try to sort out the 2 moving parts you have, vmware & kernel.  See
> which one seems to have affected this behavior the most; downgrade one
> of the 2 pieces, and see how it behaves.

Sounds perfectly reasonable.

So I understand that there are no known issues with XFS that might
explain this long term fragmentation behaviour, and that there are no
magic XFS options to improve it.

I'll see what tests I can do and report back about the findings.

Thank you & best regards


Carsten Oberscheid