Re: Link count for directories

Steve Keller
2020-08-24T21:50:37Z

Nikolay Borisov <nborisov@suse.com> wrote:

> I have implemented it so it's not that big of a deal. However turns out
> it has pretty steep requirements for backport because so far btrfs
> always kept the link count of dirs to 1. So such a change should be
> justifiable because it's not only the kernel code that is affected but:
>
> 1. Backporting relevant patch to older, stable kernels

Why would that be needed?

> 2. Changing btrfs-progs so that it doesn't erroneously think a kernel
> with link count larger than 1 is broken.

OK, should be doable, right?

> So how effective is such an optimisation to the software using it ?

It's not only optimization like in find(1). As an old and long-time Unix
user I'd also like that traditional behavior. It just feels more correct
since if you do mkdir ./a ./b ./c ./d, you will actually see the 4 links
to the current dir if you do ls -ai a b c d and the two links from . itself
and from ..

Steve