> An i-node is actually a data-structure with 13 pointers being it's
> content among other required data that it "holds". Ten of these
> not "directly" point to data-blocks, but instead point to others
> structures (i-node). This is b'cos, if it were not so the maximum file
The last two pointers *don't* point to inodes. The indirect
pointer just point to a block (that doesn't contain an inode) on the disk
that contains a list of pointers to subsequent blocks that contain data.
It would be wasteful to replicate all the access and permission related
info in each indirect block.
The point is that the indirect pointers *don't* point to inodes.
They point to plain disk block that contains further pointers.
> REALLY VERRRRRRRY LARGE file sizes... So my dear kedar, an inode is
> actually much much more than just a file...
I fail to see what you mean by "inode is much much more than a
file". In fact the statement "In essence an inode is a file" is from
Morris Bach's book on Unix internals.
What I suppose is meant by the statement is that there is a *one
to one* mapping between an inode and a file on the disk, an inode contains
all the information about the file that the kernel needs to know (except
for process specific info like current offset in the file, file open mode
- r/rw/w/a etc.). And an inode is the only way you get to the data in a
file.
I also fail to see the reason why should the huge capacity of an
inode to hold info about the blocks of data occupied by a file should make
it "much much more" than a file.
> Also like someone else suggested, the inode settings could be manually
> controlled at installation time in one of the older slackware distros...
No big deal. Even now mke2fs provides you the options to control
the inode density ( option -i "bytes-per-inode"). Its just that old
slackware allowed you to control this while formatting your basic
filesystems. Just do a man mke2fs, it has lot more options to fine tune
your filesystem (not on the fly though).
Regards,
Kedar.
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Kedar N. Patankar.
Senior Software Engineer.
ishoni Networks
...Broadband for everyone
http://www.ishoni.com
email - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: +91-80-2292125 (Work)
Fax: +91-80-2995545 (Work)
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