On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 08:57:12PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote: > On Oct 7, 2020, at 2:14 PM, Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > If those aren't the right way to express that, I could potentially > > adapt. I had a similar such conversation on linux-ext4 already (about > > inline data with 128-bit inodes), which led to me choosing to abandon > > 128-byte inodes rather than try to get ext4 to support what I wanted > > with them, because I didn't want to be disruptive to ext4 for a niche > > use case. In the particular case that motivated this thread, what I was > > doing already worked in previous kernels, and it seemed reasonable to > > ask for it to continue to work in new kernels, while preserving the > > newly added checks in the new kernels. > > This was discussed in the "Inline data with 128-byte inodes?" thread > back in May. While Jan was not necessarily in favour of this, I was > actually OK with improving the ext4 code to handle this case better, > since it would (at minimum) clean up ext4 to make a clear separation > of how it is detecting data in the i_block[] array and the system.data > xattr, and I don't think it added any complexity to the code. > > I even posted a WIP patch to that effect, but didn't get a response back: > https://marc.info/?l=linux-ext4&m=158863275019187 My apologies, I thought I responded to that. It looks promising to me, though I wouldn't have the bandwidth to take it to completion anytime soon. > I *do* think that inline_data is an under-appreciated feature that I > would be happy to see some improvements with. I don't think that small > files are a niche use case, and if we can clean up the inline_data code > to work with 128-byte inodes I'm not against that, even though I'm not > going to use that combination of features myself. I'd love to see that happen. At the time, it seemed like too large of a change to block on, which is why I ended up deciding to switch to 256-byte inodes.
