From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: Space Maps? Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 10:33:36 -0500 Message-ID: <20141124153336.GA10992@thunk.org> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Holger =?iso-8859-1?Q?Hoffst=E4tte?= Return-path: Received: from imap.thunk.org ([74.207.234.97]:47739 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752062AbaKXPd5 (ORCPT ); Mon, 24 Nov 2014 10:33:57 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 12:43:51PM +0000, Holger Hoffst=E4tte wrote: >=20 > Cleaning out some old research papers I came again across the proposa= l > for "space maps" in ext4 [1]. What happened to that? Was it rejected > due to too much risk or other technical reasons? The benefits sound > appealing, so I was wondering if there's something fundamentally wron= g > with the suggested approach. No one ever submitted patches. The other issue would be the 71 patents which Jeff Bonwick claimed in his blog that Sun filed on technologies relating ZFS. I wouldn't know whether there are any patents that read on space maps, because like many companies (due to the United States' dysfunctional patent system), my employer doesn't allow me to look at patents --- and so I don't want to know (see previous comments about the US's dysfunctional patent system). However, if anyone knows of space maps being used in some file system before ZFS, that would certainly be interesting and something that I _would_ want to know. There is some thinking about using an in-memory AVL tree to track free space, and demand-loading it from the bitmaps, but no one has had the time to implement it to date. Cheers, - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" i= n the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html