Re: ext4 features

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 06:33:01PM +0200, Thomas Glanzmann wrote:
>> I would like to know which new features are planed to be incorported by
>> ext4. So far I only read about supporting bigger filesystems to fit
>> recent hardware developments. So are there any other big goals for ext4?
> 
> Some of the ideas which have been tossed about include:
> 
> 	* nanosecond timestamps, and support for time beyond the 2038

The 2nd one is probably more urgent than the first. I can see a general 
benefit from timestamp in ms, beyond that seems to be a specialty 
requirement best provided at the application level rather than the bits 
of a trillion inodes which need no such thing.

One argument against it is that with SMP with *almost* the same time in 
each CPU, cache everywhere in the i/o process, and various flavors of 
network filesystems, the atime/mtime become less and less useful for 
determining with great precision which file is most recently modified or 
accessed.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   Obscure bug of 2004: BASH BUFFER OVERFLOW - if bash is being run by a
normal user and is setuid root, with the "vi" line edit mode selected,
and the character set is "big5," an off-by-one errors occurs during
wildcard (glob) expansion.