Ext3 users - Feb 2006 - Status of fragment support, advantages of having fewer indoes

Hi,

There wasn't much information regarding fragment support of ext2/3 since
2003
[1], Andreas stating that there were problems with the xattr implementation. Has
this changed in the meanwhile?

My second question is regarding the bytes-per-inode ratio: What benefits would I
gain from having fewer inodes? I reckon it's only diskspace (if so, how
much?).

best regards,
Michael Renner

[1] http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20030428_214.html#8

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Michael Renner wrote:
> My second question is regarding the bytes-per-inode ratio: What 
> benefits would I gain from having fewer inodes? I reckon it's only 
> diskspace (if so, how much?).
Whenever you have to fsck, it needs to scan all inodes.  So you can 
reduce fsck times by having fewer inodes.  This isn't usually a problem 
on small partitions, but when you get into the TB range it can be really 
annoying to wait hours for a fsck.

Damian Menscher
-- 
-=#| <menscher at uiuc.edu> www.uiuc.edu/~menscher/ Ofc:(650)253-2757 |#=-
-=#| The above opinions are not necessarily those of my employers. |#=-

On Feb 28, 2006  23:33 +0000, Michael Renner wrote:
> There wasn't much information regarding fragment support of ext2/3
since 2003
> [1], Andreas stating that there were problems with the xattr
implementation.
>  Has this changed in the meanwhile?
> 
> [1] http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20030428_214.html#8
Still the same story.  I don't think fragment support will be implemented
until there is some common architecture with large pages (or other fundamental
page cache rework), where it makes sense to have large (say 64kB) pages,
and fragments for smaller files.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.