Do I need to zero-fill a qcow2 image before compacting it?

I want to recreate a dynamically allocated qcow2 image in order to shrink it. Is it sufficient that all unnecessary files have been deleted, or do I also need to fill the space formerly occupied by those files with zeros? In other words, is qemu-img filesystem-aware?

Solution 1:

Yes, you do need to zero-fill the filesystem if you want to recover the space used by deleted files. And no, qemu-img isn't fs-aware.

I forgot to do this for one VM image I created today (a minimal Debian Sid image for my openstack cloud at work) and it ended up being almost 900MB, even with "-c" for qcow2 compression.

I recreated it after running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/zero ; rm -f /root/zero ; shutdown -h now", and the image size shrunk down to about 335MB. That's a lot less (worthless) data to copy around whenever I start up a new instance.

there were a lot of deleted files, because the VM started out as debian squeeze and was apt-get upgraded to sid.

Solution 2:

See also: virt-sparsify, an utility which can zero-fill filesystems inside disk images (supporting various formats):

http://libguestfs.org/virt-sparsify.1.html

Solution 3:

I´m using zerofree ( apt-get install zerofree ) for this task:

Zerofree finds the unallocated blocks with non-zero value content in an ext2, ext3 or ext4 file-system and fills them with zeroes

after that you can shrink your image:
kvm-img convert -O qcow2 original_image.qcow2 deduplicated_image.qcow2