On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> I'd like to see something more drastic. Indeed, that union crap is by
> far the worst offender and needs fixing. But there's a whole pile of
> other junk that's just not needed all the time.
Richard, may I remind you that we are supposed to be in the freeze? There
may be a chance to trim the union down _and_ get it into 2.4.
[snip]
> Yeah, but 2.4 is too close. Such a change is going to require a fair
> bit of surgery for all filesystems.
You don't need it on all filesystems.
> I still prefer my idea of splitting the dcache and icache so that you
> can maintain a populated dentry tree without keeping the inodes
> hanging around as well. This seems far less invasive and also brings
> even more space savings.
Less invasive??? It requires a lot of changes in the internal VFS locking
protocol. And that affects (in non-obvious ways) every friggin' code path
in namei.c and dcache.c. It's going to happen, but that's _not_ a
2.4.early stuff. Sorry. Just too high potential of introducing a lot of
new and interesting races. I will fork VFS-CURRENT after 2.4.0 release,
then such stuff may go there without destabilising 2.4. Maybe some parts
will be possible to fold back during 2.4, but complete thing will not be
merged until 2.5.early.
