Re: Large File support and blocks.

From: Stephen C. Tweedie (sct@redhat.com)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 04:27:43 EST


Hi,

On Fri, Sep 01, 2000 at 01:30:26PM +0300, Matti Aarnio wrote:
>
> Stephen, could you have a moment to look at the struct buffer_head {}
> alignment matters ? And possible configure time change to make the
> block number possibly a 'long long' variable ?

> Changeing field order might be doable now, while I definitely think that
> changeing blocknumber variable type is 2.5 matter.

Right --- 2.5 will have to see a proper API for allowing 64-bit
addressing on PCI buses too, for large memory Intel boxes. Right now
we force bounce buffers in the ll_rw_block code, but we need a way to
push that down to the driver if a given driver can do PCI64 or DAC
addressing. I'd rather not touch things now, but wait until we're
ready to do the job properly.

> opposed by Linus in the past (see <linux/fs.h> for it), putting
> 64-bit integer in place of 32-bit one grows the head by one
> extra padding (32 bits) at some architectures in addition to
> the variable size growth. A "whoops!" I think.
>
> I think that for example SPARC32 has stricter alignment rules than
> what i386 and 68k series processors have.

The compiler will usually deal with that by adding the necessary
padding. You need this even on i386 --- ints get 32-bit aligned even
if preceeded by a char or short type in a struct.

Cheers,
 Stephen
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