I still can't make any sense of this description. What is an external agent? Userspace obviously can't ever see a change in the extent map, so it can't be meant. It would help a lot if you could come up with a concrete user for this, including example code. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html