I'm just getting my feet wet with Alpine Linux (v3.13.2) running as a VM. (On Hyper-V, but I don't think that should matter here.) I'm wondering why, after install, Alpine Linux appears to only use the expected much-less-than 800GiB, but during install it writes enough that the .vhdx file grows out to almost 4GiB?

Story

I downloaded and used the "virtual" .iso to install into a new, blank VM. I created a single 127GiB, dynamically-expanding vhdx for the drive; it starts life as a 4MiB .vhdx file, like always. The VM was given 1GiB RAM, 4 vCPU, and a NIC. During setup-alpine, I chose defaults almost exclusively ('cept the keyboard, and timezone, IIRC), but I installed in "sys" mode to "sda".

At the point where it actually makes the filesystem, that .vhdx file grows from 4MiB to ~1.7GiB at one point, then again up to ~3.5GiB by the time I'm told to reboot.

After dismounting the .iso, rebooting and logging in, I'm finally looking at a 3.72GiB .vhdx file. But df shows I'm not using nearly that much:

# df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs           10240        0     10240   0% /dev
shm               505164        0    505164   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3      128048328   189800 121310972   0% /
tmpfs             101036      108    100928   0% /run
/dev/sda1         523248      272    522976   0% /boot/efi

It's not all contiguous "zeros", because I tried to do my usual Optimize-Vhd routine (Powershell), and it didn't reduce the size of the .vhdx. I'm expecting that I'll have to figure out how to defrag from within the Alpine Linux instance before Optimize-Vhd would shrink the .vhdx file.

Thoughts?

I'm just getting my feet wet with Alpine Linux (v3.13.2) running as a VM. (On Hyper-V, but I don't think that should matter here.) I'm wondering why, after install, Alpine Linux appears to only use the expected "0-700MB", but during install it writes enough that the .vhdx file grows out to almost 4GiB?

Story

I downloaded and used the "virtual" .iso to install into a new, blank VM. I created a single 127GiB, dynamically-expanding vhdx for the drive; it starts life as a 4MiB .vhdx file, like always. The VM was given 1GiB RAM, 4 vCPU, and a NIC. During setup-alpine, I chose defaults almost exclusively ('cept the keyboard, and timezone, IIRC), but I installed in "sys" mode to "sda".

At the point where it actually makes the filesystem, that .vhdx file grows from 4MiB to ~1.7GiB at one point, then again up to ~3.5GiB by the time I'm told to reboot.

After dismounting the .iso, rebooting and logging in, I'm finally looking at a 3.72GiB .vhdx file. But df shows I'm not using nearly that much:

# df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs           10240        0     10240   0% /dev
shm               505164        0    505164   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3      128048328   189800 121310972   0% /
tmpfs             101036      108    100928   0% /run
/dev/sda1         523248      272    522976   0% /boot/efi

It's not all contiguous "zeros", because I tried to do my usual Optimize-Vhd routine (Powershell), and it didn't reduce the size of the .vhdx. I'm expecting that I'll have to figure out how to defrag from within the Alpine Linux instance before Optimize-Vhd would shrink the .vhdx file.

Thoughts?

I'm just getting my feet wet with Alpine Linux (v3.13.2) running as a VM. (On Hyper-V, but I don't think that should matter here.) I'm wondering why, after install, Alpine Linux appears to only use the expected much-less-than 800GiB, but during install it writes enough that the .vhdx file grows out to almost 4GiB?

Story

I downloaded and used the "virtual" .iso to install into a new, blank VM. I created a single 127GiB, dynamically-expanding vhdx for the drive; it starts life as a 4MiB .vhdx file, like always. The VM was given 1GiB RAM, 4 vCPU, and a NIC. During setup-alpine, I chose defaults almost exclusively ('cept the keyboard, and timezone, IIRC), but I installed in "sys" mode to "sda".

At the point where it actually makes the filesystem, that .vhdx file grows from 4MiB to ~1.7GiB at one point, then again up to ~3.5GiB by the time I'm told to reboot.

After dismounting the .iso, rebooting and logging in, I'm finally looking at a 3.72GiB .vhdx file. But df shows I'm not using nearly that much:

It's not all contiguous "zeros", because I tried to do my usual Optimize-Vhd routine (Powershell), and it didn't reduce the size of the .vhdx. I'm expecting that I'll have to figure out how to defrag from within the Alpine Linux instance before Optimize-Vhd would shrink the .vhdx file.

Thoughts?

I'm just getting my feet wet with Alpine Linux (v3.13.2) running as a VM. (On Hyper-V, but I don't think that should matter here.) I'm wondering why, after install, Alpine Linux appears to only use the expected much-less-than 800GiB, but during install it writes enough that the .vhdx file grows out to almost 4GiB?

Story

I downloaded and used the "virtual" .iso to install into a new, blank VM. I created a single 127GiB, dynamically-expanding vhdx for the drive; it starts life as a 4MiB .vhdx file, like always. The VM was given 1GiB RAM, 4 vCPU, and a NIC. During setup-alpine, I chose defaults almost exclusively ('cept the keyboard, and timezone, IIRC), but I installed in "sys" mode to "sda".

At the point where it actually makes the filesystem, that .vhdx file grows from 4MiB to ~1.7GiB at one point, then again up to ~3.5GiB by the time I'm told to reboot.

After dismounting the .iso, rebooting and logging in, I'm finally looking at a 3.72GiB .vhdx file. But df shows I'm not using nearly that much:

# df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs           10240        0     10240   0% /dev
shm               505164        0    505164   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3      128048328   189800 121310972   0% /
tmpfs             101036      108    100928   0% /run
/dev/sda1         523248      272    522976   0% /boot/efi

It's not all contiguous "zeros", because I tried to do my usual Optimize-Vhd routine (Powershell), and it didn't reduce the size of the .vhdx. I'm expecting that I'll have to figure out how to defrag from within the Alpine Linux instance before Optimize-Vhd would shrink the .vhdx file.

Thoughts?