The fallocate tool is quite nifty and is used to preallocate or deallocate space to a file. It is much faster than traditional tools like dd, because it doesn’t write zeroes or any garbage to the file, which can take a lot of time, depending upon the size of the file.
From the man page:
fallocateis used to manipulate the allocated disk space for a file, either to deallocate or preallocate it. For filesystems which support thefallocatesystem call, preallocation is done quickly by allocating blocks and marking them as uninitialized, requiring no IO to the data blocks. This is much faster than creating a file by filling it with zeroes.
Let’s compare the two and create a 1GiB file.
Using dd:
$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=file.out bs=1024 count=1024000
1024000+0 records in
1024000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB, 1000 MiB) copied, 2.0432 s, 513 MB/s
real 0m2.047s
user 0m0.529s
sys 0m1.518s
Using fallocate:
$ time fallocate -l 1GiB file.out
real 0m0.017s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.005s
That’s a pretty significant difference!
Of course, there are ways to use
ddthat can mitigate this. I’m using what I feel is the most common way of using the tool for file creation.
Let’s now look at some examples.
Adjusting Swap Space
It seems that the canonical example for fallocate is that of resizing swap space. My distro is a good candidate for using fallocate to resize the swap space as the space is a file, not a partition:
$ swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 2G 5.6M -2
2GB seems a bit low (it’s the default for Ubuntu), as I’ve 15GB of RAM, and it’s been recommended that swap space should double that of memory for when the system hibernates, among other things.
I’ve also plenty of available disk space, so there’s no reason why I can’t increase the size of the swap file.
How can you find the size of your hard disk(s)? Well, here are some ways!
$ lsblk | ag sda sda 8:0 0 232.9G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi └─sda2 8:2 0 232.4G 0 part / $ $ df -h | ag sda /dev/sda2 228G 57G 160G 27% / /dev/sda1 511M 6.7M 505M 2% /boot/efi $ $ sudo parted -l Model: ATA WDC WDS250G2B0B- (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 250GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Disk Flags: Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 538MB 537MB fat32 EFI System Partition boot, esp 2 538MB 250GB 250GB ext4Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
This advice isn’t as applicable today as it was in the bad old days, because a machine can have hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and it would be infeasible (and unnecessary) to double that as swap space. In fact, with the amount of memory that most modern machines support, technically you could run your machine without the need for any swap space (granting, that is, that you’ll never put the machine into hibernation).
Different Linux distributions have different recommendations concerning the size of the swap space. I’ll go with what Ubuntu recommends; for machines with more than 1GB, the swap size should be at least the square root of the system memory and not more than double. In my case, with 16GB of RAM, I’ll be increasing the swap file from 2GB to 4GB.
I’m quivering with excitement!!
Turn off the swap file:
$ sudo swapoff /swapfile
Reallocate:
$ sudo fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
Mark it:
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
mkswap: /swapfile: warning: wiping old swap signature.
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 4 GiB (4294963200 bytes)
no label, UUID=056fad59-c719-4904-89bb-322709649727
Finally, re-enable it:
$ sudo swapon /swapfile
And witness the fruits of your labor:
$ swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 4G 0B -2
$
$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15G 6.3G 5.8G 483M 3.3G 8.3G
Swap: 4.0G 0B 4.0G
Time to get a nice coffee, that was exhausting!
nuts
Like Vanessa Williams, I’ve gone and saved the best for last.
The nuts program was developed as a simple* replacement for programs such as TrueCrypt, which was suddenly and mysteriously discontinued. An audit was undertaken to ensure that there were no backdoors or security holes in the program, and it was found to be generally safe to use.
As a casual user of TrueCrypt, I followed the story closely.I wrote nuts to give me the behavior that I desired from TrueCrypt and similar programs: a locked vault with strong encryption that I controlled.
Here’s the basic idea: create a filesystem, store stuff in it and encrypt with GPG. This can then be backed up anywhere I have access to storage.
fallocateto (quickly) create a large filemkfs.ext4,mkfs.btrfs, et al., to create a filesystemGPGfor security
Here’s a snippet of C where I’m using the fallocate to preallocate a large file:
if ((r = execlp("fallocate", "fallocate", "-l", fsize, filename, NULL)) == -1) {
perror("fallocate operation");
free(fsize);
return 1;
}
The result is then mounted and treated as any mount point. I’ve used it before for storing client information, invoices and receipts, and it works very nicely as nuts handles the tedium of creating and removing mount points and mounting and unmounting.
Let’s look at some examples from the project repository.
Create a file and mount point:
$ ./nuts open foo.bar mnt_here
[WARN] There is no filename `foo.bar`... Create? [Y/n]:
Size of file [250MB]: 500MB
Select the filesystem type:
1. ext2
2. ext3
3. ext4
4. fat
Select: 3
[snipped for brevity]
Mounting to mnt_here/
Done!
Close a file and remove mount point:
$ ./nuts close foo.bar mnt_here
Encrypt? [Y/n] n
Unmounting mnt_here/
Done!
Building is easy:
$ make
Conclusion
I conclude that you should use fallocate liberally, as necessary. I also conclude that the nuts program is sweet, and that you should give it a whirl.
* Emphasis on simple, as I am in no position to speak authoritatively on cryptographic algorithms and mathematics.