On Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:26:50 +0000 (GMT), jwalther
<jwalther@citytel.net> said:
> On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
>> The trouble is that you have to do it for _every_ write request in the
>> hole, unless you do fancy things with the tree and have a sparse map
>> --- in which case you're losing a lot of the intended efficiency gain
>> anyway. The direct map table seems to be a better idea all round for
>> writing into holes.
> Whats so important about holes anyways? No other FS has them.
Every standard Unix filesystem has them. They are a part of expected
Unix file semantics. People do use them --- many database libraries
use sparse files, and older versions of the Linux shared libraries
also used holes.
We don't have to bend over backwards to support them efficiently if
people do pathological things with holes, but we do need at least to
support them fully.
Cheers,
Stephen.