On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 10:42:57PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote: > On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 12:30:02PM +1000, Barry Naujok wrote: > > Could we have a more abstract method for asking the filesystem where the > > free blocks are and then using the same block addressing to tell the > > fs where to allocate/move the file's data to? > > That's fundamentally racy, so you might as well just read the > filesystem metadata from userspace. No need to go through the kernel > for that. But it a race that is _easily_ handled, and applications only need to implement one interface, not a different method for every filesystem that requires deeep filesystem knowledge. Besides, you still have to handle the case where the block you want has already been allocated because reading the metadata from userspace doesn't prevent the kernel from allocating the block you want before you ask for it... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner Principal Engineer SGI Australian Software Group - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
