Re: [PATCH 1/5] fallocate() implementation in i86, x86_64 and powerpc

["Amit K. Arora" <aarora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 11:28:15PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> The above opengroup page only permits S_ISREG.  Preallocating directories
> sounds quite useful to me, although it's something which would be pretty
> hard to emulate if the FS doesn't support it.  And there's a decent case to
> be made for emulating it - run-anywhere reasons.  Does glibc emulation support
> directories?  Quite unlikely.
> 
> But yes, sounds like a desirable thing.  Would XFS support it easily if the 
> above
> check was relaxed?

I think we may relax the check here and let the individual file system
decide if they support preallocation for directories or not. What do you
think ?

One thing to be thought in this case is the error code which should be
returned by the file system implementation, incase it doesn't support
preallocation for directories. Should it be -ENODEV (to match with what
posix says) , or something else (which might make more sense in this
case) ?

--
Regards,
Amit Arora