Hello everyone, I've pushed out the compression code along with a new disk format to the unstable branches. A while back I also created a stand alone btrfs repo that is automatically generated from the unstable git repo (with some help from David Woodhouse's script).
You can find the standalone repo here: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/mason/btrfs-unstable-standalone.git;a=summary And the full kernel repo here: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/mason/btrfs-unstable.git;a=summary I managed to miss the guilt refresh on the compression patch (it was missing a good description in the commit log) and had to do a quick rebase of the last few commits on the kernel-unstable repos. There was only a 10 minute window where the mistake was in there. Compression is off by default and enabled by mount -o compress. Even when the -o compress mount option is not used, it is possible to read compressed extents off the disk. If compression for a given set of pages fails to make them smaller, the file is flagged to avoid future compression attempts later. I made some big changes to the writeback paths: * While finding delalloc extents, the pages are locked before being sent down to the delalloc handler. This allows the delalloc handler to do complex things such as cleaning the pages, marking them writeback and starting IO on their behalf. * Inline extents are inserted at delalloc time now. This allows us to compress the data before inserting the inline extent, and it allows us to insert an inline extent that spans multiple pages. * All of the in-memory extent representations (extent_map.c, ordered-data.c etc) are changed to record both an in-memory size and an on disk size, as well as a flag for compression. >From a disk format point of view, the extent pointers in the file are changed to record the on disk size of a given extent and some encoding flags. Space in the disk format is allocated for compression encoding, as well as encryption and a generic 'other' field. Neither the encryption or the 'other' field are currently used. In order to limit the amount of data read for a single random read in the file, the size of a compressed extent is limited to 128k. This is a software only limit, the disk format supports u64 sized compressed extents. In order to limit the ram consumed while processing extents, the uncompressed size of a compressed extent is limited to 256k. This is a software only limit and will be subject to tuning later. Checksumming is still done on compressed extents, and it is done on the uncompressed version of the data. This way additional encodings can be layered on without having to figure out which encoding to checksum. Compression happens at delalloc time, which is basically singled threaded because it is usually done by a single pdflush thread. This makes it tricky to spread the compression load across all the cpus on the box. We'll have to look at parallel pdflush walks of dirty inodes at a later time. Decompression is hooked into readpages and it does spread across CPUs nicely. -chris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
