#779: package update -----------------------------------------------+---------------------------- Reporter: knarf | Owner: dcastl2 Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: minor | Milestone: Component: Einstein Toolkit Virtual Machine | Version: Resolution: | Keywords: -----------------------------------------------+----------------------------
Comment (by anonymous):
Replying to [comment:1 rhaas]:
The command (from the secure-delete package) {{{ sfill -l -l -z -v / # two -l }}} might be useful to fill empty blocks on the hard disk with zeroes to
improve compressability. Using this lets me compress a (used, with some extra packages like atlas-base-dev, scite, VisIt [which is 400MB], maybe others) virtual machine disk down to 1.2GB which is not that much larger than the original size of 1.1GB. My raw hard disk image is 8GB so I guess I must have increased it at one point to make room for eg. VisIt.
That's a neat command... I'll be sure to use it next time I compress the disk image. I also created an internal swap partition of about 768MB which I could overwrite internally with 0s then re-create swapfs before compression.
8GB is the fixed upper size limit of the VM disk. I had configured the disk image for dynamically-expanding storage albeit with an 8GB limit. Is that the internal size according to the guest OS (df -h)? If not then you might have the 'Fixed-sized storage' option selected for the disk, in which case it will always occupy 8GB on the host OS.
It might also help (while we are all testing this), to just put the
uncompressed file at a file system location at LSU so that those who have LSU accounts (all of us I think) can use rsync to do an efficient update of our "local copy".
I had thought about doing this. It likely would be more efficient now that most of the packages are installed. I'll rsync to one of our servers when I finalize my updates this evening.