Al, you write:
> Folks, there is a pretty strange detail of the allocation policy -
> if cylinder group has no free blocks past the goal ext2 tries very hard to
> avoid allocation in the beginning of the group. I.e. order looks so:
>
> * goal
> * goal .. (goal+63) & ~63
> * goal .. end of cylinder group
> * cylinder groups past one that contains goal
> * cylinder groups before one that contains goal
> * beginning of cylinder group..goal-1
>
> It looks somewhat fishy. What's the reason for such policy?
This predates me by a while, but I suspect that it is done this way on
the assumption it is easier to seek forward on the disk while reading
a file rather than seeking backwards. Also, since with new inodes the
goal is initially the first block of the group where the inode lives,
the blocks at the start of a group will generally be allocated already,
so it is usually a waste of time checking the start of the group for
free blocks.
Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
\ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert
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