Re: BIG files & file systems

[Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>]

>>>>> " " == Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> writes:

     > There are a number of interfaces that need expansion in 2.5.
     > Telldir and seekdir would be much better if they took as
     > argument some filesystem specific opaque cookie
     > (e.g. filename). Using a byte offset to reference a directory
     > entry that was found with a filename is an implementation
     > specific artifact that obviously only works for a ufs/s5fs/ext2
     > type of filesystem, and is just wrong.


     > 4 billion files is not enough to store the government's XML
     > databases in.

That's more of a glibc-specific bug. Most other libc implementations
appear to be quite capable of providing a userspace 'readdir()' which
doesn't ever use the lseek() syscall.

Note however that NFS compatibility *does* provide a limitation here:
the cookies that are passed between client and server are limited to
32 bits (NFSv2) or 64 bits (NFSv3/v4), so you'll be wanting to provide
some hack to get around this...

Cheers,
   Trond