On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 01:25:57PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote: > On Oct 8, 2020, at 1:12 PM, Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 08:57:12PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote: > >> 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. > > Does that mean you are using inline_data with 256-byte inodes? I am, yes, and it mostly works great. I've hit zero issues with it in the filesystems I'm generating. > That would also be good to know, since there haven't been any > well-known users of this feature so far (AFAIK). Since you are using > this in a read-only manner, you won't hit the one know issue when an > inline_data inode is extended to use an external block that may > temporarily leave the inode in an inconsistent state. I've run into a few other issues with it in other tools, as well. mke2fs with inline_data generates invalid files given xattrs: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-ext4/20200926102512.GA11386@localhost/T/#u And extlinux doesn't like inline_data at all: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=971002 I'll report any other issues I run into using inline_data. I agree that it's deeply underappreciated. - Josh
