Re: [PATCH] cowlinks v2

Jamie Lokier
2004-03-25T19:43:14Z

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> One of the rougher patches, in that we don't have persistent inode
> numbers. Basically the two files never have the same inode number.
> To the user they are always presented as two separate files.

That is not useful for me or the other people who want to use this to
duplicate large source trees and run "diff" between trees.

"diff" depends on being able to check if files in the two trees are
identical -- by checking whether the inode number and device (and
maybe other stat data) are identical. This allows "diff -ur" between
two cloned trees the size of linux to be quite fast. Without that
optimisation, it's very slow indeed.

-- Jamie