Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 5 Dec 1999 22:05:05 +0200 | From | Matti Aarnio <> | Subject | Re: unsigned short for nlink_t |
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On Fri, Dec 03, 1999 at 10:24:31PM +0100, Russell Coker wrote: > Currently we have an unsigned short used for the number of hard > links to a file. I have an application which uses 30,000 hard links > and I had hoped to scale it to more than 64K hard links... > > Is there any possibility that this could be changed in future kernels? > Or is POSIX forcing it to be only a 16bit number?
That thing depends mostly on filesystem internal data layouts. EXT2 has 16-bits unsigned at the disk. So has Solaris UFS..
Most filesystems seem to have 16 bit count limit, or 8-bit.. (some signed, others unsigned) (minix: 8bit). Some filesystems don't (at i-nodes) seem to support links at all (or there are no i-nodes.)
In theory nothing prevents you from cooking up your own FS which has different on-disk layout (or reuse some unused fields), and support that. (Compare how 64-bit filesizes are encoded to EXT2.) Call it something else that e.g. EXT2, say: EXT2RC Remember to tweak/create FSCK tool for it, too.
Hmm... Of course a bit troublesome is that 'stat()' structure has only 16-bit field for link count...
> Russell Coker
/Matti Aarnio
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