Re: BTRFS should increase the hard-link in the same directory limit

[Josef Bacik <josef@redhat.com>]

On 08/22/2011 12:05 PM, John Fremlin wrote:
> Josef Bacik <josef@redhat.com> writes:
>> On 08/21/2011 11:13 AM, John Fremlin wrote:
> [...]
>>> This restriction causes btrfs-convert 0.19 to crash out with a segfault and
>>> no helpful message: something like btrfs-convert: segfault at
>>> ffffffffcfb25fb9 ip 000000000040f9f1 sp 00007fffddefb398 error 6 in
>>> btrfs-convert[400000+21000].
>>>
>>> Is there any plan to alleviate this unfortunate limit (or at least make
>>> btrfs-convert give the location of the file which causes it to fail?).
>>
>> It's a disk format change, something we don't do lightly.
> 
> It would indeed require a disk format change, and hardlinks are always
> tiresome for FS designers ;-)
> 
> I think however that the format change could be designed to only affect
> people who sadly cannot at the moment use BTRFS because of this
> limitation, and be more or less unnoticeable to other people.
> 
> As James points out there are other applications that benefit from being
> able to create many names for the same inode in the same directory, and
> 256 is a very low limit!
> 
> Could this at least be put on the list of things to change? Is there a
> way to vote for it?
> 
> And the fact that btrfs-convert crashes horribly could be fixed without a
> disk-format change. . . 

It's on the list, but there are a lot of other more pressing things then
to allow weird apps to do strange things with hardlinks.  Thanks,

Josef