NAME

       nbdkit-extentlist-filter - place extent list over a plugin

SYNOPSIS

        nbdkit -r --filter=extentlist plugin extentlist=FILENAME

DESCRIPTION

       "nbdkit-extentlist-filter" is an nbdkit filter that lets you place a static list of extents on top of an
       existing plugin.  Extents record whether or not specific parts of the disk are allocated or sparse.

       You can use this with plugins which cannot get extent information themselves, but where you can get this
       information from another source.  One place where it is useful is with nbdkit-ssh-plugin(1) because the
       sftp protocol does not support reading sparseness information, but you may be able to get this
       information directly from the source disk on the remote server using commands such as xfs_bmap(8).  A
       similar situation applies to nbdkit-curl-plugin(1).

       Note that the extent list is read-only.  This filter does not monitor writes and trims in order to update
       the extent list.  What can happen is that you would write to a “hole” in the disk, but would not be able
       to read it back because the NBD client would still think that part of the disk is a hole.  So it is
       generally only safe to use this filter in read-only mode (-r option).

FILE FORMAT

       The list of extents is specified in a text file.  There is one extent specified per line.  Each line has
       the format:

        offset length type

       The "offset" and "length" fields may use any format understood by "nbdkit_parse_size".  The optional
       "type" field may be an integer, missing (same as 0), or a comma-separated list of the words "hole" and
       "zero".  (The fields correspond to the inputs of the "nbdkit_add_extent" function, see nbdkit-plugin(3)).

       An example of a valid set of extents covering a "10M" disk where the first megabyte only is allocated
       data:

        0  1M
        1M 9M  hole,zero

       Or you could omit the "hole,zero" extent since any gaps are assumed to be holes with that type:

        0  1M

       The extent list need not cover the whole disk, and does not need to be in ascending order, but it must
       not contain overlapping extents.

PARAMETERS

       extentlist=FILENAME
           Specify the file containing the extent list, in the format described in "FILE FORMAT" above.

FILES

       $filterdir/nbdkit-extentlist-filter.so
           The filter.

           Use "nbdkit --dump-config" to find the location of $filterdir.

VERSION

       "nbdkit-extentlist-filter" first appeared in nbdkit 1.18.

SEE ALSO

       nbdkit(1), nbdkit-cacheextents-filter(1), nbdkit-noextents-filter(1), nbdkit-filter(3), nbdkit-plugin(3).

AUTHORS

       Richard W.M. Jones

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2020 Red Hat Inc.

LICENSE

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