On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 09:45:04PM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote: > No functional changes in this patch, just in preparation for > allowing applications to pass in hints about data life times > for writes. > > Pack the i_write_hint field into a 2-byte hole, so we don't grow > the size of the inode. A u8 should be plenty. But talking about the representation - your write lifetime hints are a 5 option enum basically. I wonder if we really should encode it as flags, or if we should have an enum (which could be packed into a 3-bit bitfield) and then pass it down the stack in that form instead of changing the representation N times.