Now that I think about it... Relocating inodes isn't that
hard either. You just have to walk the file tree and
relocate the inode once you've found all links to it.
Walking the file tree while other operations may be changing the file
tree out from under you is hard....
You can do better by not doing a tree walk, but by keeping a cached list
of all of the disk blocks used as directories by the system, and
searching them in sequential order (this is a trick e2fsck uses), but
you're still talking about doing a huge number of blocks in kernel
space.
Probably our best hope of success is to have a combination user-level
and kernel-level scheme where the actual filesystem scan is done by the
user-level code, but you would need the kernel-level code to intercept
certain operations during the relocation operation.
- Ted
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