Ext3 users - Apr 2003 - 2.4.20 & htree

Apologies for the newbie question:

I have a (stock) 2.4.20 build (*not* -ac), and I'm trying to work with
large ext3 directories. By large, I mean 160,000 files per directory.
(Yes, I know it would be better in nested directories but such is
life).

I feel htree would benefit me. Having upgraded from an earlier version
of 2.4, I don't see any change, and close reading of the 2.4 changelog
suggests that htree isn't in there - only a patch to prevent non-htree
builds reporting corruption after being written to by an htree build.
Did I read this right?

If I am right, where is the best place to get a consolidated ext3
patch which is suitable for a production environment?

And once I have htree in the kernel, does it 'automatically' produce
the benefits on existing directories, or do I need to go through
some on-disk process to get the directory held 'in htree form'?

Alex Bligh

On Apr 04, 2003  13:38 +0100, Alex Bligh wrote:
> I have a (stock) 2.4.20 build (*not* -ac), and I'm trying to work with
> large ext3 directories. By large, I mean 160,000 files per directory.
Yes, htree will benefit you greatly.  The system will be almost unusable
without it.
> I feel htree would benefit me. Having upgraded from an earlier version
> of 2.4, I don't see any change, and close reading of the 2.4 changelog
> suggests that htree isn't in there - only a patch to prevent non-htree
> builds reporting corruption after being written to by an htree build.
> Did I read this right?
Correct.  Htree is not in any 2.4 kernels yet.
> If I am right, where is the best place to get a consolidated ext3
> patch which is suitable for a production environment?
I believe Ted has up-to-date patches for htree:

   http://thunk.org/tytso/linux/extfs-2.4-update/broken-out-2.4.21pre5-2

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/