Re: ext4 features

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Wed Jul 05 2006 - 00:20:53 EST


Benny Amorsen wrote:
"DC" == Diego Calleja <diegocg@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

DC> El Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:46:55 -0600, "Jeff V. Merkey"
DC> <jmerkey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escribiÃ:

Add a salvagable file system to ext4, i.e. when a file is deleted,
you just rename it and move it to a directory called DELETED.SAV
and recycle the files as people allocate new ones. Easy to do
(internal "mv" of


DC> Easily doable in userspace, why bother with kernel programming

In userspace you can't automatically delete the files when the space
becomes needed. The LD_PRELOAD/glibc methods also have the
disadvantage of having to figure out where a file goes when it's
deleted, depending on which device it happens to reside on. Demanding
read access to /proc/mounts just to do rm could cause problems.

Userspace has had 10 years to invent a good solution. If it was so
easy, it would probably have been done.

Actually, if it were so important it WOULD have been done. I suspect that the issue is not lack of a good solution, but lack of a good problem. The behavior you propose requires a lot of kernel cleverness, including make the inodes seem to go away, so the count is "right" for what the user sees.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
Obscure bug of 2004: BASH BUFFER OVERFLOW - if bash is being run by a
normal user and is setuid root, with the "vi" line edit mode selected,
and the character set is "big5," an off-by-one errors occurs during
wildcard (glob) expansion.

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