Re: Announce: zerotools (tools to keep virtual machine disks cleaner)

[Aleksandr Koltsoff <czr@iki.fi>]

Hi again,

Eduard Bloch wrote:
> Please add a technical overview to your introduction. As a techie, I
> would like to read what is so special about zerotools what I cannot do
> with:
> rm crapfiles && cat /dev/zero > bigfile && sync && rm bigfile && sync.
> 
> And you introduction does not tell me about anything new in your tools
> and I do not like reading a long novel to learn that simple details.

Thank you for the suggestion. I've modified the intro to cover the first
case, as for the second case (comparison to "bigfile"-technique), that
is already covered in "Other solutions". The "bigfile"-technique is
inferior when one uses virtual disks which are "sparse" (or dynamic as
some virtualization software calls them). When using "flat" (or
preallocated) virtual disk files, the bigfile technique is not so bad,
but personally I prefer an automatic mechanism so that I don't need to
do manual filling or take the virtual system to runlevel 1 specifically
for "bigfile".

ak.