Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC] [PATCH] Reducing average ext2 fsck time through fs-wide dirty bit]

[Valerie Henson <val_henson@linux.intel.com>]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 05:55:03PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Valerie Henson <val_henson@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> > 
> > ext2 is simpler and faster than ext3 in many cases.  This is sort of
> > cheating; ext2 is simpler and faster because it makes no effort to
> > maintain on-disk consistency and can skip annoying things like, oh,
> > reserving space in the journal.  I am looking for ways to make ext2
> > cheat even more.
> > 
> 
> But it might be feasible to knock up an ext3-- in which all the journal
> operations are stubbed out.

Hmm... Could we get the mark_buffer_dirty/mark_inode_dirty logic
right?  Probably create a list in the stubbed journal functions and
then mark them dirty in the journal close?  However, half the reason
I'm working on ext2 is the simplicity of the code - stubbing it out
would solve the performance problem but not the complexity problem.

Note that ext3's habit of clearing indirect blocks on truncate would
break some things I want to do in the future. (Insert secret plans
here.)

-VAL