Re: Do we need dump for ext4?

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>]

On Aug 28, 2008  16:35 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Yeah, but that requires dealing with Ulrich and for my own mental
> health I try to avoid that as much as possible.  :-)
> 
> This idea is something that has been in my "if only I had time or some
> minions to dispatch" category for quite some time.  We can actually do
> this in the kernel.
> 
> For small directories which could potentially get converted into htree
> format, we already sucking the entire directory and putting it into an
> rbtree.  We could just do this for all directories less than or equal
> to 32k, but have them returned sorted by inode instead of by hash
> value.  At least on my laptop, this accounts for 99.93% of the
> directories on my root filesystem.

What happens if the directory is grown at that point?  I thought the
reason for keeping it sorted in hash order was to deal with the
telldir headache?  I guess if the whole thing is in memory then it
can be attached to the fd and discarded once read or seeked-on
(and POSIX doesn't require reporting new entries after the start
of the read).

Doing this at the VFS level would also benefit _most_ filesystems,
though maybe not ones like XFS or btrfs that have their own preferred
order.

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