Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld at sun.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 16:43 -0700, Matthew Ahrens wrote:
> > This case will deliver a new filesystem version, which adds support for
> > type information stored in directory entries. This is for compatability
> > with other operating systems (eg, MacOS) which return this information
> > in their stat structure.
>
> By any chance, is this the BSD feature which allows for faster
> filesystem tree-walks by optionally returning type information
> (directory vs non-directory vs. unsure) to directory readers in a new
> "d_type" field in struct dirent, allowing them to *skip* potentially
> expensive stat() operations on entries known to not be directories?
How could expensive in-kernel operations avoided without extending the on-disk
dir format also?
BSD did enhance the on-disk format.
> IMHO the larger feature is worth importing if we can figure out how to
> make a compatible API/ABI change for it.
It would be possible to introduce a new getdents() call that produces
a different format. Older applications would use the old getdents() call.
J?rg
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