We make this entirely independent of the regular discard field, i.e. the
one that controls discard behaviour when the home directory is online.
Not all combinations make a ridiculous amount of sense, but most do.
Specifically:
online-discard = yes, offline-discard = yes
→ Discard when activating explicitly, and during runtime using
the "discard" mount option, and discard explicitly when logging
out again.
online-discard = no, offline-discard = yes
→ The new default: when logging in allocate the full backing
store, and use no discard while active. When loging out discard
everything. This provides nice behaviour: we take minimal storage
when offline but provide allocation guarantees while online.
online-discard = no, offline-discard = no
→ Never, ever discard, always operate with fully allocated
backing store. The extra safe mode.
Lennart Poettering