Contiguous file sequences

[Daire Byrne]

Hi,

I have been trying to figure out how to lay down a file sequence (e.g.
images) such that they are guaranteed to always be contiguous on disk
(i.e. no block gaps between them). Currently if I write a sequence to
disk things like "filestreams" help keep everything in the same AG and
the allocation algorithm seems to prefer to try and place files next
to eachother but without the filesystem knowing the total size of the
sequence there are always likely to be gaps in the blocks where
existing data has been written. So even if the first file is written
completely contiguously to disk there is no way to guarantee that
there is contiguous free space after it to write the rest of the
images.

What I really want is to be able to find and reserve enough space for
the entire sequence and then write the files into that big contiguous
range. I tried to do this with xfs_io hoping that the allocator would
just know what I wanted and do the right thing (ever the optimist...).
So something like this:

  # find and reserve a big chunk to fit all my files in
  xfs_io -f -c "resvsp 0 136314880" -c "bmap -v" $DIR/test.0

  # now shrink it keeping the start block
  xfs_io -f -c "freesp 13631488 0" -c "bmap -v" $DIR/test.0

  # now write a bunch of files and hope they continue from test.0 on disk
  dd if=/dev/zero of=$DIR/test.0 bs=1M count=13 conv=nocreat,notrunc
  for  x in `seq 1 4`; do
      dd if=/dev/zero of=$DIR/test.$x bs=1M count=13 conv=notrunc
  done

But a new allocation is made for the first new file in the sequence
elsewhere on disk and I don't know how to get it to use the large
chunk of free contiguous space after the "test.0" file instead.
Another option might be to create a single contiguous large file,
concatenate all the images into it and then split it up on disk using
offsets but I don't think such a thing is even possible? I always know
the image sequence size beforehand, all images are exactly the same
size and I can control/freeze the filesystem access if needed.

Anybody got any suggestions? It *seems* like something that should be
possible and would be useful.

Daire