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authorDapeng Mi <dapeng1.mi@linux.intel.com>2026-09-17 09:52:33 +0800
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2026-09-22 11:37:46 +0200
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tree531306c2299f9a269f0a986e29f17ba972180104 /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
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perf/x86/intel: Rename DMR offcore_rsp attribute to offmodule_rspgrafted
DMR introduces Offmodule Response events in place of the legacy Offcore Response events, but it still exposes the inherited offcore_rsp PMU attribute for programming the corresponding MSR data. Rename the DMR PMU attribute to offmodule_rsp so the sysfs interface matches the underlying event name and avoids user & tooling confusion. Signed-off-by: Dapeng Mi <dapeng1.mi@linux.intel.com> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260917015234.981153-12-dapeng1.mi@linux.intel.com
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+Bigalloc
+--------
+
+At the moment, the default size of a block is 4KiB, which is a commonly
+supported page size on most MMU-capable hardware. This is fortunate, as
+ext4 code is not prepared to handle the case where the block size
+exceeds the page size. However, for a filesystem of mostly huge files,
+it is desirable to be able to allocate disk blocks in units of multiple
+blocks to reduce both fragmentation and metadata overhead. The
+bigalloc feature provides exactly this ability.
+
+The bigalloc feature (EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_BIGALLOC) changes ext4 to
+use clustered allocation, so that each bit in the ext4 block allocation
+bitmap addresses a power of two number of blocks. For example, if the
+file system is mainly going to be storing large files in the 4-32
+megabyte range, it might make sense to set a cluster size of 1 megabyte.
+This means that each bit in the block allocation bitmap now addresses
+256 4k blocks. This shrinks the total size of the block allocation
+bitmaps for a 2T file system from 64 megabytes to 256 kilobytes. It also
+means that a block group addresses 32 gigabytes instead of 128 megabytes,
+also shrinking the amount of file system overhead for metadata.
+
+The administrator can set a block cluster size at mkfs time (which is
+stored in the s_log_cluster_size field in the superblock); from then
+on, the block bitmaps track clusters, not individual blocks. This means
+that block groups can be several gigabytes in size (instead of just
+128MiB); however, the minimum allocation unit becomes a cluster, not a
+block, even for directories. TaoBao had a patchset to extend the “use
+units of clusters instead of blocks” to the extent tree, though it is
+not clear where those patches went-- they eventually morphed into
+“extent tree v2” but that code has not landed as of May 2015.
+