From: Eric Sandeen Subject: Re: [RFC] Heads up on sys_fallocate() Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:15:19 -0600 Message-ID: <45E72647.9000001@redhat.com> References: <20070117094658.GA17390@amitarora.in.ibm.com> <20070225022326.137b4875.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070301183445.GA7911@amitarora.in.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , suparna@in.ibm.com, cmm@us.ibm.com, alex@clusterfs.com, suzuki@in.ibm.com To: "Amit K. Arora" Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20070301183445.GA7911@amitarora.in.ibm.com> Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org Amit K. Arora wrote: > This is to give a heads up on few patches that we will be soon coming up > with. These patches implement a new system call sys_fallocate() and a > new inode operation "fallocate", for persistent preallocation. The new > system call, as Andrew suggested, will look like: > > asmlinkage long sys_fallocate(int fd, loff_t offset, loff_t len); > One thing I'd like to see is a cmd argument as well, to allow for example allocation vs. reservation (i.e. allocating blocks vs. simply reserving a number), as well as the inverse of those functions (un-reservation, de-allocation)? If the allocation interface allows allocation/reservation within arbitrary ranges, if the only way to un-allocate is via a truncate, that's pretty asymmetric. -Eric