Again with regard to my rewrite of fscache and cachefiles: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dhowells/linux-fs.git/log/?h=fscache-iter I've got rid of my use of bmap()! Hooray! However, I'm informed that I can't trust the extent map of a backing file to tell me accurately whether content exists in a file because: (a) Not-quite-contiguous extents may be joined by insertion of blocks of zeros by the filesystem optimising itself. This would give me a false positive when trying to detect the presence of data. (b) Blocks of zeros that I write into the file may get punched out by filesystem optimisation since a read back would be expected to read zeros there anyway, provided it's below the EOF. This would give me a false negative. Is there some setting I can use to prevent these scenarios on a file - or can one be added? Without being able to trust the filesystem to tell me accurately what I've written into it, I have to use some other mechanism. Currently, I've switched to storing a map in an xattr with 1 bit per 256k block, but that gets hard to use if the file grows particularly large and also has integrity consequences - though those are hopefully limited as I'm now using DIO to store data into the cache. If it helps, I'm downloading data in aligned 256k blocks and storing data in those same aligned 256k blocks, so if that makes it easier... David
