[Gluster-users] Sparse files and heal full bug fix backport to 3.6.x

[Steve Dainard]

There is a thread from 2014 mentioning that the heal process on a
replica volume was de-sparsing sparse files.(1)

I've been experiencing the same issue on Gluster 3.6.x. I see there is
a bug closed for a fix on Gluster 3.7 (2) and I'm wondering if this
fix can be back-ported to Gluster 3.6.x?

My experience has been:
Replica 3 volume
1 brick went offline
Brought brick back online
Heal full on volume
My 500G vm-storage volume went from ~280G used to >400G used.

I've experienced this a couple times previously, and used fallocate to
re-sparse files but this is cumbersome at best, and lack of proper
heal support on sparse files could be disastrous if I didn't have
enough free space and ended up crashing my VM's when my storage domain
ran out of space.

Seeing as 3.6 is still a supported release, and 3.7 feels too bleeding
edge for production systems, I think it makes sense to back-port this
fix if possible.

Thanks,
Steve



1. https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2014-November/019512.html
2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1166020