Re: Ext3 vs NTFS performance

Christoph Hellwig
2007-05-05T17:49:36Z

On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 07:49:13PM +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> How about providing a way to stop kernel (or filesystem) to make gaps
> in files instead? Like some ioctl(fd, FS_NOGAPS, 1) -- pretty much
> like 'doze has, just the opposite (on windows, this flag is "on" by
> default).

Giving filesystems non-hole semantics is non-trivial. Not allowing
for holes creates a lot of complications in unix-like filesystems.

> But the main point is that samba has to keep track of things which it
> doesn't do now, and those things becomes.. interesting (difficult if
> at all possible to track) in multi-user/concurrent-writes environment.

Samba is there to deal with a braindead protocol and braindead clients,
so let it continue to do that. No need to push this into the kernel.