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authorRob Herring (Arm) <robh@kernel.org>2026-08-31 14:43:51 -0500
committerDmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>2026-09-13 18:17:31 -0700
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treef0b5f37b42fc13b9908a31b657c646b024231cdd /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
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Input: tsc2007 - read "ti,poll-period" as u32grafted
The "ti,poll-period" property is documented as a normal uint32 cell. The driver used a u64 helper, which makes the helper type disagree with the schema even though the stored value is still small. Read "ti,poll-period" with the u32 helper matching the documented DT cell size. Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5-5 Signed-off-by: Rob Herring (Arm) <robh@kernel.org> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260831194352.1185860-1-robh@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.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.
+