Re: large directory handling speed

Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Mon, 31 May 1999 17:55:27 +0200

Alexander Viro wrote:
> > To populate the dentry cache, we should add "dentry without inode" -- a
> > dentry for which we have the inode number, but haven't fetched the inode
> > itself yet. The mechanism isn't there, but wouldn't be hard to add IMO.
> > Thus your issue about icache reaping goes away completely.
>
> There is no such thing as persistent inode numbers on many filesystems,
> VFAT included. Period. Inumbers are good for UNIX-type filesystems and
> nowhere else. iget() is *badly* abused in many places and that leads to
> shitload of race conditions.

I agree -- it's not a general solution, but perhaps a mechanism some
filesystems can use if they want to and *do* have reliable iget()?
The filesystems we actually use a lot can do this ;-)

-- Jamie

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