On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Florian Philipp <li...@binarywings.net> wrote: > Hi list! > > I noticed that beginning with kernel 3.8, ext4 can store small files > entirely inside the inode. But I couldn't find much additional information: > > - Is the improvement automatically enabled?
I don't believe so. I think you need to explicitly enable the feature inline_data when you mkfs. > - Is the change backwards compatible? Can I still read such files with > kernel 3.7? It is defined as INCOMPAT_INLINE_DATA so an older kernel should refuse to mount it at all if it does not know how to handle this option. Depending on your partition layout, you may also need a boot loader which knows how to read inline data. I think there is a patch to enable it on grub2, not sure if it is included in mainline or not. > - Can current stable e2fsprogs (especially e2fsck) handle this? I grepped sources of e2fsprogs 1.42.7 and it contains references to inline data, but manpages don't. mkfs looks like it might not support the inline_data option yet? So I'm not sure if things are quite ready for "prime time"... If you try, please let us know how it goes. :)
