Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

Jeff Garzik
2006-06-09T18:43:14Z

Alex Tomas wrote:
>>>>>> Linus Torvalds (LT) writes:
> LT> My point is, maintaining two different pieces is SIMPLER.
>
> "different" is a key word here. why should we copy most of ext3 code
> into ext4?
>
> LT> It would be bigger, if you made ext3 do 48-bit block numbers.
>
> nope, we re-use existing i_data w/o any changes. yes, we've made
> inode a bit larger to cache last found extent. this improves
> performance in some workloads noticable though.
>
> LT> See? ext3 would become strictly _worse_ for the majority of users, who
> LT> wouldn't get any advantage. That's my point.
>
> would "#if CONFIG_EXT3_EXTENTS" be a good solution then?

No, that would be worse.

Jeff