From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261476AbVGTS5E (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:57:04 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261479AbVGTS5E (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:57:04 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([66.187.233.31]:31135 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261476AbVGTSzV (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:55:21 -0400 Message-ID: <42DE9D80.3070905@redhat.com> Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:52:48 -0400 From: Peter Staubach User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird (X11/20050322) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jan Blunck CC: Chris Wedgwood , J?rn Engel , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , Linux-Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: [PATCH] ramfs: pretend dirent sizes References: <42D72705.8010306@tu-harburg.de> <20050716003952.GA30019@taniwha.stupidest.org> <42DCC7AA.2020506@tu-harburg.de> <20050719161623.GA11771@taniwha.stupidest.org> <42DD44E2.3000605@tu-harburg.de> <20050719183206.GA23253@taniwha.stupidest.org> <42DD50FC.9090004@tu-harburg.de> <20050719191648.GA24444@taniwha.stupidest.org> <20050720112127.GC3890@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> <20050720181101.GB11609@taniwha.stupidest.org> <42DE9C71.7090903@tu-harburg.de> In-Reply-To: <42DE9C71.7090903@tu-harburg.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jan Blunck wrote: > > I don't want to tell where these are in general, I need an easy way to > seek to the m'th directory + offset position without reading every > single dirent. With i_sizes != 0 it is straight forward to use "the > sum of the m directory's i_sizes + offset" as the f_pos to seek to. > For this purpose it is not necessary to have a "honest" i_size as long > as the i_size is bigger than the offset of the last dirent in the > directory. > You are not going to get this functionality. It is simply not how directories work nowadays. Very few file systems are going to be usable if you insist upon this semantic. It is simply not possible to guess, with variable sized entries and with distributed directory structures. ps