>On any decent filesystem st_ino should uniquely identify an object and >reliably provide hardlink information. The UNIX world has relied upon this >for decades. A filesystem with st_ino collisions without being hardlinked >(or the other way around) needs a fix.
But for at least the last of those decades, filesystems that could not do that were not uncommon. They had to present 32 bit inode numbers and either allowed more than 4G files or just didn't have the means of assigning inode numbers with the proper uniqueness to files. And the sky did not fall. I don't have an explanation why, but it makes it look to me like there are worse things than not having total one-one correspondence between inode numbers and files. Having a stat or mount fail because inodes are too big, having fewer than 4G files, and waiting for the filesystem to generate a suitable inode number might fall in that category. I fully agree that much effort should be put into making inode numbers work the way POSIX demands, but I also know that that sometimes requires more than just writing some code. -- Bryan Henderson San Jose California IBM Almaden Research Center Filesystems - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
