Re: Maximum files per Directory

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Friday, May 04, 2001 01:15:22 PM -0600 Andreas Dilger
<adilger@turbolinux.com> wrote:

> Chris writes:
>> On Tuesday, May 01, 2001 04:57:02 PM -0600 Andreas Dilger
>> <adilger@turbolinux.com> wrote:
>> > I see that reiserfs plays some tricks with the directory i_nlink count.
>> > If you exceed 64536 links in a directory, it reverts to "1" and no
>> > longer tracks the link count.
>> 
>> Correct.  The link count isn't used at all when deciding if the directory
>> is empty (we use the size instead), so we can just lie to VFS if someone
>> tries to make tons of subdirs.
> 
> For that matter, ext2 doesn't use the link count on directories to
> determine if they are empty either, so it shouldn't be too hard to do the
> same with the ext2 indexed-directory code.  Is there a reason that
> reiserfs chose to have "large number of directories" represented by "1"
> and not "LINK_MAX+1"?
> 

find and a few others consider a link count of 1 to mean there is no link
count tracking being done.

-chris