Creating sparse files on Linux

[Steve French]

I noticed that some Linux file systems (including ext4) create sparse
files by default in this scenario

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/16M bs=1M count=0 seek=16

(which creates a 16MB sparse file)

but over cifs/smb2/smb3 this does not create a sparse file (and
probably should).

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/openspecification/archive/2010/11/05/notes-on-sparse-files-and-file-sharing.aspx

http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2009/07/05/creating-sparse-files-on-linux-hosts-with-dd/