Re: 2.3.x wish list?

Michel LESPINASSE (walken@wrs.com)
Mon, 24 May 1999 14:01:44 +0200 (MET DST)


On Fri, 21 May 1999, Marcel J.E. Mol wrote:

> Getting back the the mke2fs -m option. Wouldn't it be better to change the
> semantics of this option to specify the amount of blocks, MB or
> something instead of percentages? 1% of an 8GB filesystem is still 80 MB.
> I see no direct reason for a reserved area so big...

I think the main purpose of the reserved area is not to have it available
for data in case of an emergency, but to help keep the fragmentation low.
A decent filesystem should be able to maintain a low fragmentation but
these policies can not be applied if there is not enough free blocks -
basically the filesystem then has no choice about which blocks to use.

So 5% of a 8G fs are 400 MB, but this is considered as a good compromise
because you won't have to run defrag on your 8G volume every now and then.

--
Michel "Walken" LESPINASSE - Development Engineer at Wind River Systems
                             walken@wrs.com - http://www.via.ecp.fr/~walken/
DNA is the software of Life.
Did you realize you can have that much fun for a code merge ?

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