>> No. It was a first course in filesystems. I imagine the guy picked 
>> est2 because it was easy to look up the reference material. 
> 
> Well, he still failed. Or you misunderstood what he was saying. :-)

It was... my God... about ten years ago now. o_O

>> While we're on the subject... NTFS has an optimisation where "small" 
>> files are stored in the same block as the directory entry. (Saves 
>> seeking and wasting half a disk block.) Does est2 have any 
>> optimisations for small files?
> 
> NTFS's "i-nodes" (called MFT records) are some 1K to 4K in size. Ext2's 
> inodes are closer to 64 bytes or something. There's no slack space to 
> speak of in an ext2 i-node.

Sure. I was just wondering if ext2 does anything special with small 
files, that's all.

Since files can only be allocated an integral number of data blocks, 
really tiny files potentially waste an entire block. A directory full of 
millions of tiny files could actually eat quite a lot of space. But by 
putting that data inside the directory itself, you avoid all that wasted 
space, and save on some disk seek time to boot. It seems like a neat trick.

Then again, I've sometimes wondered what would happen if you had some 
filesystem that split the disk into several seperate regions with 
different block sizes, and allocated files accordingly. (I.e., put the 
really huge files in the area with big blocks, and the tiny files in 
some area with tiny block sizes.) I rather suspect you'd permanently be 
running out of whichever size you happen to need the most tho...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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