On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 10:24:04AM +0100, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote: > > I think the chief question at this level is whether to support the > > "keep the length" flag for fallocate, fdiscard, both, or neither. The > > linux fallocate uses this to allow allocating blocks past EOF, which > > strikes me as nuts; > > Why is it bad?
What Mouse said, pretty much. Not only is it semantic nonsense, it requires reworking fsck. > I am interested to port software, and of course it uses > FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE and FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE... FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE is fdiscard(). I don't believe in deleting things by making an allocate call, or perpetrating other people's bad design to avoid patching a couple packages. The question is whether FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE makes sense; it does for fdiscard, but I remain unconvinced in the case of fallocate. -- David A. Holland dholl...@netbsd.org