On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Mr. B-o-B <mr.chew.baka at gmail.com> wrote:
> Josh More cried from the depths of the abyss...
>
>> Ext4 effectively does a block-level wipe when you do a delete. (Makes
>> forensics difficult.)  Odds are that your "rm" command has removed the
>> file pointers, but the kernel has not yet completed scrubbing the
>> disk.  I would expect the space to become free once that process is
>> done.
>>
>
> Understood.  Would the kernel scrubbing cause disk activity?  I do not see
> any disk activity at the moment.
>

I would expect that it does, but I don't know how the kernel on your
system would prioritize that activity.  Personally, I'd just run
"sync" a few times and then check it in the morning.  If it's not
clear, then I'm wrong.  :)

Personally, if I were writing a driver and prioritizing read times
(which is common), I would prioritize the scrubbing as low as
possible, as that would only cause a production issue if the drive was
near 100% full while a read prioritization issue would happen every
time someone deleted a file.  Not sure how the driver you're using was
written though.

-Josh