On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 03:38:56PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > > Actually, this is a non-issue. The reason that it is handled for extent-only > > is that this is the only way to allocate space in the filesystem without > > doing the explicit zeroing. For other filesystems (including ext3 and > > ext4 with block-mapped files) the filesystem should return an error (e.g. > > -EOPNOTSUPP) and glibc will do manual zero-filling of the file in userspace. > > It can be a bit suboptimal from the layout POV. The reservations code will > largely save us here, but kernel support might make it a bit better. Actually, the reservations code won't matter, since glibc will fall back to its current behavior, which is it will do the preallocation by explicitly writing zeros to the file. This wlil result in the same layout as if we had done the persistent preallocation, but of course it will mean the posix_fallocate() could potentially take a long time if you're a PVR and you're reserving a gig or two for a two hour movie at high quality. That seems suboptimal, granted, and ideally the application should be warned about this before it calls posix_fallocate(). On the other hand, it's what happens today, all the time, so applications won't be too badly surprised. If we think applications programmers badly need to know in advance if posix_fallocate() will be fast or slow, probably the right thing is to define a new fpathconf() configuration option so they can query to see whether a particular file will support a fast posix_fallocate(). I'm not 100% convinced such complexity is really needed, but I'm willing to be convinced.... what do folks think? - Ted - 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
