On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 10:47:03AM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote: > What about the idea to stop using the blocks count for doing the > fast/slow symlink check, and instead use i_size? IMHO this is far > more robust than using the blocks count, since we've repeatedly seen > bugs when the number of blocks allocated to an inode changes for > done reason (e.g. xattrs, bigalloc, multi-block xattrs in the > future). I did see your earlier proposal on this front, but I didn't want to this change without thinking about it a bit more closely. In particular, we probably would want to enforce this change in e2fsck for a while first. Currently, if we have a slow symlink where i_size is less than 60 bytes, both e2fsprogs and the kernel handles this case. See the attached file system image. Yes, I created it synthetically, but keep in mind that that there are other implementations of ext2/3/4 other than just in the Linux kernel. In particular, the GNU Hurd and *BSD have their own independent implementation of ext2. So even if the Linux kernel has never created a slow symlink with i_size <= 60 bytes, but that doesn't mean that it's for certain that there are no such implementations out there in the wild. That doesn't mean that we should never make such a change, but it does mean that it's not something I want to do lightly. - 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
