Re: [PATCH V5 00/23] ext4: Add inline data support.

[Tao Ma <tm@tao.ma>]

On 08/13/2012 11:04 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I had an idea which I think would make inline directories more
> efficient, although it wouldn't be a backwards compatible change with
> the existing patch sets to date.
that should be fine since we don't have much machines deployed by now.
> 
> We don't actually need to store the entry for '.', since we know what
> that should be, and we could just store the parent directory in a
> 4-byte entry.  By not storing the full directory entries for "." and
> "..", we would save 20 bytes, which for a 256 byte inode where only
> 120 bytes or so are available for the inline directory, is pretty
> significant.  (We can just synthesize them for the benefit of readdir
> and lookup --- and I'm pretty sure the VFS is doing its own synthesis
> for "." and possibly ".." already as far as lookup is concerned.)
As andreas said in another e-mail, that would make the codes a little
complex. So in general, in my previous version, I just tried to refactor
most of the codes so that they can work for both inline inode and dir
blocks. But if these changes are merged, we have to re-write all of the
codes that are currently shared, such as ext4_find_entry, empty_dir,
ext4_add_entry etc.

Having said that, maybe it is worth the codes effort if we can see a
great improvement for inline dir. Since Andreas and you are both OK with
this new solution, I can try to re-work the inline data patch to support it.

Thanks
Tao