Re: [RFC] Heads up on sys_fallocate()

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Mon Mar 05 2007 - 10:36:31 EST


On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 07:15:33AM -0800, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> Theodore Tso wrote:
> > Given that glibc already has to support this for older kernels, I
> > would argue that there's no point putting in generic support for
> > filesystem that can't support a more advanced way of doing things.
>
> Well, I'm sure the kernel can do better than the code we have in libc
> now. The kernel has access to the bitmasks which say which blocks have
> already been allocated.

The layer of the kernel where a totally generic fallback would be
implemented does not have access to this information. We could do
a mostly generic helper for block filesystems that allows to implement
fallocate this way without a lot of their own code.
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