Hi Peter.
>>> Q. Is there any likelihood of the e2fs-compressed patch (or
>>> anything similar) making its way into the standard kernel
>>> any time soon?
>> Probably it is too late for 2.4.0, but beyond that the answer is
>> yes only if somebody takes on the job of getting it in shape: is
>> e2compr still being maintained,
> I'm the current maintainer of e2compr. I continue to work on it,
> but I've announced my desire that someone else take on
> `maintainer' title, as for quite some time I've been busy with
> other things.
I'd be willing to do so, except for the fact that I have very little
experience with tweaking code at that level of complexity. I have
tweaked the patch against 2.2.13 to patch cleanly against 2.2.14, and
would love to see that included into the 2.2 series so that the code
can get some more exposure, but that's unlikely as I understand it.
>> and is there a robust 2.3 version?
> Nope. The change to Linux' write mechanism in early 2.3
> (namely having writes go through writepage instead of having
> ext2_file_write create disk buffers) means that there's no
> longer a convenient place to do the compression (in the most
> common case, where we wish to compress more than a page full
> at a time).
> Probably the fix is to organise for multiple pages to be written
> at once. It just requires that someone spend a chunk of time
> getting familiar with how pages usually get written out, and the
> locking issues and so on.
The alternative would be for the fs drivers to include two extra
function pointers, one to preprocess a file being read, the other to
preprocess a file being written, with a NULL value for those pointers
(the default) resulting in the data being passed straight through.
> Stephen, since you're already familiar with both the mm system
> and ext2, can you comment on that plan?
Can you also comment on the above suggestion?
Best wishes from Riley.
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