From: Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho Subject: Re: Beginner questions about ext4 Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 18:13:08 +0200 Message-ID: References: <20130623115953.GA16193@thunk.org> <20130701165524.GB23896@thunk.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: "Theodore Ts'o" Return-path: Received: from mail-pd0-f182.google.com ([209.85.192.182]:64472 "EHLO mail-pd0-f182.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754778Ab3GJQNJ (ORCPT ); Wed, 10 Jul 2013 12:13:09 -0400 Received: by mail-pd0-f182.google.com with SMTP id r10so6513843pdi.13 for ; Wed, 10 Jul 2013 09:13:08 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <20130701165524.GB23896@thunk.org> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > I'm not sure whant you mean by "flexible groups". There is no such > concept. This wiki says that flex_bg stands for "Flexible Block Groups": https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Disk_Layout#Flexible_Block_Groups >> If not, I wonder how a reader will recognize which groups were merged ... > > And block groups don't get merged. > > You should think of a flex block group as a collection of block > groups. (Just as a number of provinces make up country, or a > collection of towns make up a county, and a number of counties make up > a province.) I'll try to be more specific. When I am reading a ext4 file system and I find that there exists an inode /etc/ with groupnr 32 and nodenr 260099, will this group 32 be in the same position (distance in bytes from the beginning of the disk) as in ext3? Or will the flex_bg make the first 16 groups fit into the size that previously 1 group utilized? So group 32 in ext 4 would be in the physical position of group 2 in ext3. If I have s_log_groups_per_flex=4 (seams the be the most popular value), then each and every set of 16 groups will be groups into flex_bgs or only some are grouped into flex_bgs? Basically I have a reader for ext3 and I added EXTENT support and it works now fine for the group 0, but for higher groups it is not working and I'm trying to find out what I need to change ... I'm trying to find what physically changed here... but it is a hard battle. Much harder than EXTENT support was. thanks, -- Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho