Denis> On 10 January 2003 05:34, Peter Chubb wrote:
>> Preferably, all the inumbers for the same file would point to the
>> same directory entry; but I can see no easy way to do that.
>> Keeping an in-memory table for files with multiple links might be
>> the best way, as there aren't that many on a typical filesystem.
Denis> And what will happen on a non-typical filesystem with 1 million
Denis> hardlinks?
Denis> The root of the problem is a fundamental layering violation in
Denis> traditional Unix filesystems: inode numbers should NOT be
Denis> visible to userspace. Userspace just needs a way to tell
Denis> hardlinks from separate files, that's all. Exposing inumbers
Denis> does that, but creates tons of problems for filesystems which
Denis> do NOT have such a concept.
The problem is that in Unix the fundamental identity of a file is
the tuple (blkdev, inum); names are merely indices (links) that resolve to
that tuple. Personally, I'd swap to a pair of system calls to map
name to (blkdev, inum), and open(blkdev, inum). Think of the inode
number as a unique within-filesystem index.
-- Dr Peter Chubb peterc@gelato.unsw.edu.au You are lost in a maze of BitKeeper repositories, all almost the same.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/