I saw this question and while 2 years is a long time, can anybody share anything about any progress on ext4lazyinit. I am specifically interested in this statement by Ted Tso -
So that is what the lazyinit thread does; it is slowly zeroing out the not-yet-used portions of the inode table. Previously, the inode table initialization would be done during mke2fs, but this would make the mkfs process very slow for very large or very slow disks. So instead, we defer this to when the file system is mounted. The reason why can take hours is that we deliberately try to make it take roughly 10% of the disk bandwidth, to minimize the impact on system performance. This can be tuned via a mount option, or you can force the inode table initialization to happen at mke2fs time (so what might take 2 hours for your drive would make mke2fs about 12 minutes longer). You can also temporarily or permanently disable the lazy initialization via a mount option. - Ted Tso.
So, if I were to install Debian on a new hdd, how would I go about it, also what would the disadvantages of doing this way rather than using plain ext4.
