On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 02:56:38PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote: > I noticed that the default inode size for mkfs in e2fsprogs has been > changed to 256 bytes. I noticed this because I am seeing users complain > that they can no longer access their ext partitions using the windows > driver, which only supports normal 128 byte inodes. I'd like to know > why this default was changed. > > As I understand it, the larger inode size means that ea/acl can be > stored directly in the inode. Are there any other benefits? That's the main one. The other benefit is that ext4 uses a bigger inode to store some extra fields such as the file creation time, nanosecond timestamps, and the 64-bit version number neede which is used for NFSv4's client-side caching. > It seems > that using extended attributes is rather uncommon in the first place, The big user of extended attribute is SELinux, Samba, and Beagle. Since a number of distributions are now starting to enable SELinux by default (for better or for worse), it makes a big difference from a performance perspective for those distributions. I can't imagine that it would be that hard to fix the Windows driver to be able to support 258 byte inodes. It should be a one- or two-line fix, for those people who care. - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
