Subject: Re: large inode numbers
To: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
From: Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/16/2003 17:20:33
Martin Husemann wrote:
> I think it's time to bite the bullet and version struct dirent to give us
> large inode numbers. See PR kern/23773 for a trigger.
> 
> Why didn't we do this a long time ago?

Even today it's not ordinary to have filesystem which would
require 4G inodes. I'm not sure what's the inode size
nowadays, but you'd need at least 2048GB (with 512B per inode)
just to store the inode data.

It _seems_ the msdosfs problem could be solved by different
fileid calculation - for example using disk block number of first block
in a file as 'inode' number would work up to 2048GB at least (with
512B block size). Maybe even beyond 2048GB - IIRC FAT32 can adress
4G blocks maximum, so it would probably force bigger block size
for >2048GB filesystems (if it's supported at all).

Jaromir
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>            http://www.NetBSD.cz/
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