Re: [PATCH 0/1] genext2fs: support large files and filesystems without using large amounts of memor

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, 2012-03-30 at 13:43 -0700, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Op 29 mrt. 2012, om 15:07 heeft Richard Purdie het volgende geschreven:
> 
> > On Thu, 2012-03-29 at 00:51 +0800, Dexuan Cui wrote:
> >> Hi RP, Saul, Paul, Darren, Mark, Josh and joaohf and all, please comment.
> >> 
> >> Let's figure out if this big patch is accepatable or not...
> >> 
> >> With this patch, I can successfully create a 8.5GB .ext3 file with genext2fs.
> >> The speed is slow -- I spent about 1.5 hours.
> > 
> > If these patches solved all the problems and made things work
> > wonderfully I'd probably say we'd take them. Unfortunately I don't
> > consider taking 1.5 hours to build am 8GB filesystem "wonderful", its
> > rather worrying and I don't think its performing any where need fast
> > enough for our needs :(.
> > 
> > Patching genext2fs at this point in the cycle is a rather risky
> > undertaking too and I'm getting very concerned about this. 
> 
> The biggest issue I have with genext2fs is that it currently allocates
> RAM for the complete image, which in my case will cause it to swap and
> for other users cause it to crash, since image > (ram + swap). Fixing
> the memory issue before the release would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> What about putting it on the shortlist for backports after the
> release? That should give us all more time to test it and eventually
> get into the hands of stable branch users. Of course I'd still prefer
> it to go in before the release and backport fixes :)

I should point out one of the patches in this mega patch set is one for
the memory issue.

I'd appreciate some others giving this patch set a go, see if they can
find any regressions for their usual use cases.

Based on the feedback I've had so far I'm leaning towards merging it but
I'm not making a final decision yet, I'd like some test reports...

Cheers,

Richard