Sorry for not reviewing this patch earlier, but looking at the disk format, I wonder if it's really necessary to allocate an inode for each EA. Given that we have a fixed inode table, if the user creates a large number of 2k EA's (on a 4k filesystem) or 512 byte EA's (on a 1k) filesystem, this could easily burn a huge number of inodes, causing users to run out. We don't actually *need* to use an inode; what if we make use e_value_block and e_hash to be a 64-bit block number, and use e_value_offs (if 0) to indicate whether the 64-bit block number contains data, or (if 1) contains the root of an extent tree. This adds a bit of complexity to the hash calculation if we want to support sharing the EA block that contains pointers to Large EA's, but from what I can tell the proposed patch doesn't support this anyway (and it seems highly unlikely that multiple files with large EA's could be able to be shared anyway). The upsides of this patch (not needing to use inodes) seems to be worth the downsides (slightly more complexity, and not being able to share EA blocks). 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
