From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Woodhouse Subject: File perforation. Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 22:06:00 +0000 Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <21551.1042063560@passion.cambridge.redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from dwmw2 (helo=passion.cambridge.redhat.com) by passion.cambridge.redhat.com with local-esmtp (Exim 3.35 #5) id 18WOKm-0005bc-00 for linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org; Wed, 08 Jan 2003 22:06:00 +0000 To: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org I keep receiving requests from users to allow space saving by making holes in files. For people using JFFS2, a compressed file system designed for use on fairly small solid state storage devices, this is a fairly reasonable request, and it's also fairly simple to implement. It's only the interface I'm concerned about. I've been resisting these requests because I really don't want to do it with an ioctl on the file. Only if we can have a generic sys_perforate() would I really want to do it. Apparently it's hard to implement on block-based file systems. I don't really care about that though -- just falling back to writing zeroes to the offending range (or indeed returning -EINVAL) would be perfectly sufficient until/unless it gets implemented for other file systems. All I want is an interface that doesn't make me feel dirty :) Comments? -- dwmw2