• Contact: tech-kern

Heavily used file systems tend to spread the blocks all over the disk, especially if free space is scarce. The traditional fix for this is to use dump, newfs, and restore to rebuild a volume; however, this is not acceptable for current disk sizes.

The resize_ffs code already contains logic for relocating blocks, as it needs to be able to do that to shrink a volume; it is likely that it would serve nicely as a starting point for a defragmenting tool.

Note that safety (not scrambling the volume if the system crashes while defragging) is somewhat tricky and critically important.