From: Eric Sandeen Subject: Re: [RFC] Heads up on sys_fallocate() Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:16:30 -0600 Message-ID: <45E83FCE.4040008@redhat.com> References: <20070117094658.GA17390@amitarora.in.ibm.com> <20070225022326.137b4875.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070301183445.GA7911@amitarora.in.ibm.com> <45E7BE4B.5070602@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "Amit K. Arora" , 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: Badari Pulavarty Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([66.187.233.31]:36721 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S2992532AbXCBPuc (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 Mar 2007 10:50:32 -0500 In-Reply-To: <45E7BE4B.5070602@us.ibm.com> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org Badari Pulavarty wrote: > > 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); >> > I am wondering about return values from this syscall ? Is it supposed to > return the > number of bytes allocated ? What about partial allocations ? If you don't have enough blocks to cover the request, you should probably just return -ENOSPC, not a partial allocation. > What about > if the > blocks already exists ? What would be return values in those cases ? 0 on success, other normal errors oetherwise.. If asked for a range that includes already-allocated blocks, you just allocate any non-allocated blocks in the range, I think. -Eric