please, try the patch attached.

thanks, Alex

Eric Sandeen wrote:
> One thing that seems to be happening is that thanks to delalloc, a nice
> big request is coming in (only 1036 blocks of the 4096, not quite sure
> why), but then it gets into ext4_mb_normalize_request(), which finds the
> most blocks it can "preallocate" is 256, and chops down the request to
> 256 blocks.  Shouldn't this preallocation be over & above what was asked
> for, vs. reducing the request?
> 
> Ok, so, we get allocations in 256-block chunks...  Why they don't all
> come out contiguous, I don't know yet...
> 
> -Eric