May 07, 2010

Do you think it is stored together ? (checking fragmentation)

The title might be quite misleading, and hence I have put the real meaning in the brackets. The post is about using ioctl with the operation FIBMAP to check the block numbers allocated to a file in a sequential order. Whenever there is a jump in the block numbers, we know that there is some fragmentation in the way the file has been allocated on the disk. Looking at the code, it is pretty obvious that I have not written it (it is obvious from the usage of assert ;)), a little googling about FIBMAP landed me at this code. All I have done is modify the code to print only those block numbers where there appears to be fragmentation happening.The code is :




note : the FIBMAP operation is privileged, hence you will have to run the program once compiled as root. I am also adding the results I got for a test run on a file about 702 MB in size.

My next task would be to fill up most of the free space in the filesystem and then create some large files and check out the fragmentation for those files. For more information on fragmentation you could check out the useful information here.

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