On 08/22/2011 12:05 PM, John Fremlin wrote:

Josef Bacik [off-list ref] writes:

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On 08/21/2011 11:13 AM, John Fremlin wrote:

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This restriction causes btrfs-convert 0.19 to crash out with a segfault and
no helpful message: something like btrfs-convert: segfault at
ffffffffcfb25fb9 ip 000000000040f9f1 sp 00007fffddefb398 error 6 in
btrfs-convert[400000+21000].

Is there any plan to alleviate this unfortunate limit (or at least make
btrfs-convert give the location of the file which causes it to fail?).

It's a disk format change, something we don't do lightly.

It would indeed require a disk format change, and hardlinks are always
tiresome for FS designers ;-)

I think however that the format change could be designed to only affect
people who sadly cannot at the moment use BTRFS because of this
limitation, and be more or less unnoticeable to other people.

As James points out there are other applications that benefit from being
able to create many names for the same inode in the same directory, and
256 is a very low limit!

Could this at least be put on the list of things to change? Is there a
way to vote for it?

And the fact that btrfs-convert crashes horribly could be fixed without a
disk-format change. . . 

It's on the list, but there are a lot of other more pressing things then
to allow weird apps to do strange things with hardlinks.  Thanks,

Josef