Re: fscache review comments, part 1

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 11:30:17AM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Sep 28, 2006  17:45 +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > 02-ino64-nfs.diff:
> > 	Unfortunately there's a lot of broken userspace that can't deal
> > 	with 64bit inode numbers, so you need to make the lod behaviour
> > 	a mount option at least, probably even the default.  Given that
> > 	we're going to run into problems like that it might make sense
> > 	to make the option VFS-level instead of just in nfs.  (Note:
> > 	XFS already has an option like that)
> 
> A general question - is there a known list of common applications that have
> problems with 64-bit inodes?  It's been mentioned several times, but I'm
> wondering if any effort is going toward fixing those apps so that 5 years
> from now (or whenever) we CAN have 64-bit inodes.  If it relates to on-disk
> formats like ustar, we can always work with something like star to ensure
> that it is useful in the future.

The most important ones we've seen at SGI were various version of tar
and many commercial backup applications that silently (!) lost data
on restore with 64bit inode numbers.  I wasn't directly involved with
those issue, but maybe some people that were at SGI at that time can
fill in more details.