Re: universal filesystem convertor

[Andrew Clausen]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 09:40:22AM +0300, Serguei Tzukanov wrote:
> Andrew Clausen wrote:
> > 
> > Not supporting sparse files would suck.  Perhaps it would be nice
> > to hack up support (in a non-standard way) for FAT and friends?
> I.e. write some special loopback driver? - not me, it's boring.

Nah, I mean make a non-standard version of file systems that don't
support sparse files, that do support them.

> > I can imagine.
> > 
> > When doing copying, you should get all the benefits of caching...
> > 
> > OTOH, this is also a drawback, since you can't control how the
> > sparse file is allocated.  It might fail.  I guess lots of sync()s
> > are needed.
> 4 fsync()s each block group (there is also a variant with 5 fsync()s and 
> a few less copying - buggy).

Can you please define your terminology, and comment your struct's?
Thanks.

> I just can say that I personally not going to build yet another
> grand partition/filesystem tool. I would prefer to see it (idea or code) 
> integrated into some existing thing, e.g. parted.
> But I'll certainly maintain current implementation.

Yep, sounds wise to me.  ATM, Parted can't do LVM and friends, so
you wouldn't be able to do in-place partition -> LVM conversion
with it.

> Well, I revised my opinion :-) -  it seems to me now that algorithm is 
> correct (but does unneeded things)
> Anyway I'll rewrite this part for cleanup.

Cool :)

Andrew