Re: [rfc] Near-constant time directory index for Ext2

Linus Torvalds
2001-02-22T04:03:08Z

In article <3A948ACB.7B55BEAE@innominate.de>,
Daniel Phillips <phillips@innominate.de> wrote:
>
>I mentioned this earlier but it's worth repeating: the desire to use a
>small block size is purely an artifact of the fact that ext2 has no
>handling for tail block fragmentation. That's a temporary situation -
>once we've dealt with it your 2,000,000 file directory will be happier
>with 4K filesystem blocks.

I'd rather see a whole new filesystem than have ext2 do tail-block
fragmentation.

Once you do tail fragments, you might as well do the whole filesystem
over and have it do fancier stuff than just handling sub-blocking.

Another way of saying this: if you go to the complexity of no longer
being a purely block-based filesystem, please go the whole way. Make the
thing be extent-based, and get away from the notion that you have to
allocate blocks one at a time. Make the blocksize something nice and
big, not just 4kB or 8kB or something.

And don't call it ext2.

Linus