I have the updated patches ready which take care of Andrew's comments. Will run some tests and post them soon.
But, before submitting these patches, I think it will be better to finalize on certain things which might be worth some discussion here: 1) Should the file size change when preallocation is done beyond EOF ? - Andreas and Chris Wedgwood are in favor of not changing the file size in this case. I also tend to agree with them. Does anyone has an argument in favor of changing the filesize ? If not, I will remove the code which changes the filesize, before I resubmit the concerned ext4 patch. 2) For FA_UNALLOCATE mode, should the file system allow unallocation of normal (non-preallocated) blocks (blocks allocated via regular write/truncate operations) also (i.e. work as punch()) ? - Though FA_UNALLOCATE mode is yet to be implemented on ext4, still we need to finalize on the convention here as a general guideline to all the filesystems that implement fallocate. 3) If above is true, the file size will need to be changed for "unallocation" when block holding the EOF gets unallocated. - If we do not "unallocate" normal (non-preallocated) blocks and we do not change the file size on preallocation, then this is a non-issue. 4) Should we update mtime & ctime on a successfull allocation/ unallocation ? - David Chinner raised this question in following post: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/4/29/407 I think it makes sense to update the [mc]time for a successfull preallocation/unallocation. Does anyone feel otherwise ? It will be interesting to know how XFS behaves currently. Does XFS update [mc]time for preallocation ? -- Regards, Amit Arora - 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