Re: [git pull] fixes for 3.12-final

Bruce Fields
2013-11-04T22:30:20Z

On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 03:39:14PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > IIRC, at some point such an attempt has seriously hurt iget() on 32bit
> > boxen, so we ended up deciding not to go there. Had been years ago,
> > though...
>
> Yeah, I think the circumstances have changed. 32-bit is less
> important, and iget() is much less critical than it used to be (all
> *normal* inode lookups are through the direct dentry pointer).
>
> Sure, ARM is a few years away from 64-bit being common, but it's
> happening. And I suspect even 32-bit ARM doesn't have the annoying
> issues that x86-32 had with 64-bit values (namely using up a lot of
> the register space).
>
> So unless there's something hidden that makes it really nasty, I do
> suspect that a "u64 i_ino" would just be the right thing to do. Rather
> than adding workarounds for our current odd situation on 32-bit
> kernels (and just wasting time on 64-bit kernels).

I'm all for it, though I'm worried about:

$ git grep '\bi_ino\b'|wc -l
1746

so would prefer a more modest (and possibly stable-appropriate) fix for
3.13 while we sort out what i_ino's being used for.

--b.