Adding upstream version 4.19.249.upstream/4.19.249upstream

Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>

1 files changed, 22 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/ondisk/bigalloc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/ondisk/bigalloc.rst
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+Bigalloc
+--------
+
+At the moment, the default size of a block is 4KiB, which is a commonly
+supported page size on most MMU-capable hardware. This is fortunate, as
+ext4 code is not prepared to handle the case where the block size
+exceeds the page size. However, for a filesystem of mostly huge files,
+it is desirable to be able to allocate disk blocks in units of multiple
+blocks to reduce both fragmentation and metadata overhead. The
+`bigalloc <Bigalloc>`__ feature provides exactly this ability. The
+administrator can set a block cluster size at mkfs time (which is stored
+in the s\_log\_cluster\_size field in the superblock); from then on, the
+block bitmaps track clusters, not individual blocks. This means that
+block groups can be several gigabytes in size (instead of just 128MiB);
+however, the minimum allocation unit becomes a cluster, not a block,
+even for directories. TaoBao had a patchset to extend the “use units of
+clusters instead of blocks” to the extent tree, though it is not clear
+where those patches went-- they eventually morphed into “extent tree v2”
+but that code has not landed as of May 2015.
+