From: Ted Ts'o Subject: Re: Proposed design for big allocation blocks for ext4 Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:04:36 -0500 Message-ID: <20110225190436.GZ2924@thunk.org> References: <1F9A85BD-4B5E-488C-B903-0AE17AACF2B7@dilger.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Andreas Dilger , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Amir Goldstein Return-path: Received: from li9-11.members.linode.com ([67.18.176.11]:39462 "EHLO test.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754455Ab1BYTEk (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:04:40 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 08:05:43PM +0200, Amir Goldstein wrote: > > I like your design. very KISS indeed. > I am just wondering why should BIGALLOC be INCOMPAT and not RO_COMPAT? > After all, ro mount doesn't allocate and RO_COMPAT features are so muc > nicer... I can try to make it be RO_COMPAT, but one thing my design changes is that a block group will contain 32768 allocation blocks; so assuming a 4k blocks, instead of a block group containing a maximum of 32,768 4k blocks comprising 128 MB, a block group would now contain 32,768 1M blocks, or 32 GiB, or 8,388,608 4k blocks. I'm pretty sure that existing kernels have superblock sanity checks that will barf if they see this. Still, yeah, I can try allocating this as a ROCOMPAT feature, and later on, if people really care, they can patch older kernels so they won't freak out when they see a BigAlloc file system and can thus successfully mount it read-only. (Right now existing kernels will complain when s_blocks_per_group is greater than blocksize*8.) - Ted