Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Fri Jun 09 2006 - 13:49:10 EST


Matthew Wilcox wrote:
On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 10:30:06AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
And I'm not saying that just because it's a filesystem, and people get upset if they lose data. No, I'm saying it because from a maintenance standpoint, such a filesystem has almost zero cost.

One of the costs (and I'm not disagreeing with your main point;
I think forking ext3 to ext4 at this point is reasonable), is that
bugfixes applied to one don't necessarily get applied to the other.
I found some recently between ext2 and ext3, and submitted those, but I
only audited one file. There's lots more to look at and I just haven't
found the time recently. Going to three variations is a lot more work
for auditing, and it might be worth splitting some bits which genuinely
are the same into common code.

With extents and 48bit, you have multiple code paths to audit, regardless.

If applied to ext3, you have to audit

fs/ext3/*.c:
if (extents)
...
else
...

as opposed to

fs/ext3/*.c:
... non-extent code
fs/ext4/*.c:
... extent code


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