From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Christoph Hellwig Subject: external bitmaps on block devices? Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:51:55 -0400 Message-ID: <20110823035155.GA12299@infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Is there any specific reason to require the external bitmap to be on a file? Currently the code requires regular files to call bmap on them, which is a fairly dangerous thing to start with. But why don't we just allow using block devices to store the bitmap directly?