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20.16. Discarding Blocks Not in Use

The virsh domfstrim domain [--minimum bytes] [--mountpoint mountPoint] command invokes the fstrim utility on all mounted file systems within a specified running guest virtual machine. This discards blocks not in use by the file system. If the argument --minimum is used, an amount in bytes must be specified. This amount will be sent to the guest kernel as its length of contiguous free range. Values smaller than this amount may be ignored. Increasing this value will create competition with file systems with badly fragmented free space. Note that not all blocks in this case are discarded. The default minimum is zero which means that every free block is discarded. If you increase this value to greater than zero, the fstrim operation will complete more quickly for file systems with badly fragmented free space, although not all blocks will be discarded. If a user only wants to trim one specific mount point, the --mountpoint argument should be used and a mount point should be specified.

Example 20.38. How to discard blocks not in use

The following example trims the file system running on the guest virtual machine named guest1:
# virsh domfstrim guest1 --minimum 0