Re: [patch 0/6][RFC] Cleanup FIBMAP

[Mike Waychison <mikew@google.com>]

Chris Mason wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:57:06 +0100
> Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> ->bmap is ugly and horrible!  If you have to do this at the very
>> least please cause ->bmap64 to be able to return error values in case
>> the file system failed to get the information or indeed such
>> information does not exist as is the case for compressed and
>> encrypted files for example and also for small files that are inside
>> the on-disk inode (NTFS resident files and reiserfs packed tails are
>> examples of this).
>>
>> And another of my pet peeves with ->bmap is that it uses 0 to mean  
>> "sparse" which causes a conflict on NTFS at least as block zero is  
>> part of the $Boot system file so it is a real, valid block...  NTFS  
>> uses -1 to denote sparse blocks internally.
> 
> Reiserfs and Btrfs also use 0 to mean packed.  It would be nice if there
> was a way to indicate your-data-is-here-but-isn't-alone.  But that's
> more of a feature for the FIEMAP stuff.
> 

I hadn't heard of FIEMAP, so I went back and read the thread from 
April/May.  It seems that this is a much better approach than 
introducing a FIBMAP64.

What ever happened with this proposal?

Mike Waychison