On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 18:45 +0800, Andreas Dilger wrote:

On Mar 01, 2007  13:15 -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote:

quoted

One thing I'd like to see is a cmd argument as well, to allow for 
example allocation vs. reservation (i.e. allocating blocks vs. simply 
reserving a number), as well as the inverse of those functions 
(un-reservation, de-allocation)?

If the allocation interface allows allocation/reservation within 
arbitrary ranges, if the only way to un-allocate is via a truncate, 
that's pretty asymmetric.

I'd rather we just get the oft-discussed punch() syscall instead.
This is really what "unallocate" would do for persistent allocations
and it would be useful for files that were not preallocated.

I can see a difference though.  punch() would throw away written data as
well as pre-allocated-but-never-written-to data.  I can see where a user
might preallocate a large file and do a lot of random writes.  At some
point, he decides the file isn't going to grow much more, so let's free
up the remaining pre-allocated blocks.  This makes even more sense with
reservation.

The alternative would be to have punch() take a flag to specify if only
preallocated or reserved blocks should be freed.

For filesystems that don't implement punch glibc() would do zero-filling
of the punched area I guess (to make it equivalent to reading from a
hole in the file).

Or it could just fail.  Writing zeroes may be really slow and not give
the caller any benefit.  (The intention was to free blocks back to the
file system.)

Shaggy
-- 
David Kleikamp
IBM Linux Technology Center