> I was wondering, is using memory adresses as inode numbers portable to
> 64-bit architectures?
An excellent question! :-) I hope you don't mind it I share the answer.
Virtual inode numbers are completely portable to any architecture.
There are far less than 4GB of inodes on even the largest system.
Truncating a LARGE addresss [say 256-bits] to even the lower 32-bits
would not cause problems. Even with a wrap it will never wrap far
enough to cause a problem, because the inodes are in the kernel
memory space, which is far less than 4GB in size [typically a few MB].
To be precise:
NR_INODE < (((ino_t) ~0) / sizeof(struct inode))
-- Andrew E. Mileski mailto:aem@netcom.ca