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Date:      Mon, 11 Mar 2002 17:15:32 -0500 (EST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Christoph Hellwig <hch@caldera.de>
Cc:        Harti Brandt <brandt@fokus.gmd.de>, Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Increasing the size of dev_t and ino_t
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020311171401.48769A-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020311230948.A2914@caldera.de>

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On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 04:16:48PM -0500, Robert Watson wrote:
> > The complicating factor comes when you try and map the 96-bit (plus realm)
> > into the 32-bit inode number.  FreeBSD runs fine, but some applications
> > assuming the POSIX device number/inode number equality behave poorly.  For
> > example, gnu tar may find collisions and assume files are a hard link when
> > they are not.  Linux, on the other hand, uses the inode numbers within the
> > kernel, and may panic if there is a collision.
> 
> The only place Linux uses the inode number is the generic inode cache
> implementation, which may or may not be used by filesystems.  Also there
> won't be panic because you can't read in two inodes having the same
> i_ino when using it..

I may be dated: when we were working on the Coda port to Linux, once in a
while the system would blow a fuse when there was an inode number
collision.  I remember some similar reports on Arla.  However, that may
have been 2.1.x or before, or/and I may have misunderstood the failure
mode. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
robert@fledge.watson.org      NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services



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