+++ /dev/null
-=======
-dm-zero
-=======
-
-Device-Mapper's "zero" target provides a block-device that always returns
-zero'd data on reads and silently drops writes. This is similar behavior to
-/dev/zero, but as a block-device instead of a character-device.
-
-Dm-zero has no target-specific parameters.
-
-One very interesting use of dm-zero is for creating "sparse" devices in
-conjunction with dm-snapshot. A sparse device reports a device-size larger
-than the amount of actual storage space available for that device. A user can
-write data anywhere within the sparse device and read it back like a normal
-device. Reads to previously unwritten areas will return a zero'd buffer. When
-enough data has been written to fill up the actual storage space, the sparse
-device is deactivated. This can be very useful for testing device and
-filesystem limitations.
-
-To create a sparse device, start by creating a dm-zero device that's the
-desired size of the sparse device. For this example, we'll assume a 10TB
-sparse device::
-
- TEN_TERABYTES=`expr 10 \* 1024 \* 1024 \* 1024 \* 2` # 10 TB in sectors
- echo "0 $TEN_TERABYTES zero" | dmsetup create zero1
-
-Then create a snapshot of the zero device, using any available block-device as
-the COW device. The size of the COW device will determine the amount of real
-space available to the sparse device. For this example, we'll assume /dev/sdb1
-is an available 10GB partition::
-
- echo "0 $TEN_TERABYTES snapshot /dev/mapper/zero1 /dev/sdb1 p 128" | \
- dmsetup create sparse1
-
-This will create a 10TB sparse device called /dev/mapper/sparse1 that has
-10GB of actual storage space available. If more than 10GB of data is written
-to this device, it will start returning I/O errors.
projects / linux-2.6-microblaze.git / blobdiff