Comment 3 for bug 936706

I am running a 64-bit kernel, however the same bug applies to 32-bit kernels as well. I only recently upgraded to 64-bit and had used Qemu on 32-bit for years and had the same problem. Up to this point though, I didn't realize what it was doing.

I can understand why there is no sparse file support, but wouldn't the filesystem driver determine how Qemu allocates a file? As an example, FAT32 does not support sparse files either, however a Qemu image creation on this filesystem has no issues (granted, it's not as quick as making an image on ext filesystems as it has to write out all the zeros). That's I made this a bug report.

But, when creating a large file in a FAT32 filesystem I can use ls -lah and see both the size of the folder and the size of the file match - as in the file has a non-zero file size.