Re: BIG files & file systems

From: Mark Mielke (mark@mark.mielke.cc)
Date: Thu Aug 01 2002 - 07:01:44 EST

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 11:51:19PM -0400, Jan Harkes wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 05:13:46PM -0400, Alexander Viro wrote:
> > You _do_ need unique ->st_ino from stat(2), though - otherwise tar(1)
> > and friends will break in all sorts of amusing ways. And there's
> > nothing kernel can do about that - applications expect 32bit st_ino
> > (compare them as 32bit values, etc.)
> Which is why "tar and friends" are to different extents already broken
> on various filesystems like Coda, NFS, NTFS, ReiserFS, and probably XFS.
> (i.e. anything that currently uses iget5_locked instead of iget to grab
> the inode).

In theory? Maybe.

In practice, a lot more than just "tar and friends" assume that inodes
are unique...

mark (who recently, *continues* to write code that makes this assumption,
      although, granted, most of the checks are 'file caching'-type
      checks, and it isn't likely that a file will be the same size, the
      same inode, the same device, and the same path...) 

-- 
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