Theodore Tso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 01:48:49AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: >> And other filesystems (ie: ext4) _might_ use it. But ext4 is extent-based, >> so perhaps it's not work churning the on-disk format to get a bit of a >> boost in the block allocator. > > Well, ext3 could definitely use it; there are people using 8k and 16k > blocksizes on ia64 systems today. Those filesystems can't be mounted > on x86 or x86_64 systems because our pagesize is 4k, though. > > And I imagine that ext4 might want to use a large blocksize too --- > after all, XFS is extent based as well, and not _all_ of the > advantages of using a larger blocksize are related to brain-damaged > storage subsystems with short SG list support. Whether the advantages > offset the internal fragmentation overhead or the complexity of adding > fragments support is a different question, of course. > > So while the jury is out about how many other filesystems might use > it, I suspect it's more than you might think. At the very least, > there may be some IA64 users who might be trying to transition their > way to x86_64, and have existing filesystems using a 8k or 16k > block filesystems. :-)
How much of a problem would it be if those blocks were not necessarily contiguous in RAM, but placed in normal 4K pages in the page cache? I expect meta data operations would have to be modified but that otherwise you would not care. Eric - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
