[LU-9309] Add ldiskfs 64-bit inode number support

Related — Mon, 1 May 2023 16:50:29 +0000

With current hardware clusters faced with the trouble of creating enough inodes on LDISKFS partitions. MDS has 0-size files to store some information about Lustre FS files. Current MDS disk sizes allow to store large amount of such files, but EXT4 limits this number to ~4 billions.
Lustre FS has features like DNE to distribute MDS over many targets (disks), but disks are used not effectively. It would be great to have ability to store more then ~4 billions inodes on one EXT4 file system.

This topic ("64-bit inode number") recently was discussed in ext4 list. The resume is:

There are two possible solutions:
1. Store higher 32 bit of inode number in ext4 dirent
2. New feature flag which defines the use a 64-bit inode number

Andreas Dilger gave strong reasons to use 1st solution:

The reasons are:

this won't use more space for 64-bit inodes than ext4_dir_entry64

for 32-bit inode numbers will have smaller dirents

significantly more 32-bit dirents can fit into a leaf block (i.e. 10-25%)

it is backwards compatible with existing directories and can transparently store 64-bit inode numbers into 32-bit directories without a full update

it avoids duplicate code paths for ext4_dir_entry vs ext4_dir_entry64

it would be possible to only store high 16 bits (2^48 inodes) since this may be enough for ext4, since ext4_extent can only address 2^48 blocks (2^60 bytes) and there isn't much value to more inodes than blocks?

This issue is about using dirdata to store high bits of 64bit inode number.

Whamcloud Community JIRA

[LU-9309] Add ldiskfs 64-bit inode number support