Re: [RFC PATCH] ext4: Group meta-data blocks together.

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>]

On Apr 29, 2008  16:27 +0530, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:
> I haven't yet tested this. Let me know what you think.
> 
> -aneesh
> 
> This adds a per inode meta-block prealloc space from which
> meta-data block requests are served. This help in making
> sure meta-data block are closer. This is needed to speedup
> unlink of the file. Any new prealloc space is allocated near
> the goal block specified. The goal block is the last block
> allocated for the file. So we don't keep the data-block and
> meta-data block far apart.

Does this code use the mballoc "group allocator" mechanism that it
already uses for small files?  It would be convenient to re-use
this code by creating a "metadata allocation group" instead of creating
another mechanism to aggregate small IO allocations.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.