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authorUlises Mendez Martinez <umendez@google.com>2026-09-04 15:07:09 +0000
committerJosh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>2026-09-13 18:15:43 -0700
commit7e61560628d17ea6b1d8ee370f6d42694cff8758 (patch)
treee6080164b2f4c4c419894bdb3ce4d956ca9a98c5 /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
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objtool: Validate disassembler headers in libopcodes probegrafted
commit 3f2de814c059 ("objtool: Fix libopcodes linking with static libraries") tested for libopcodes availability by linking a test snippet with a forward declaration of disassemble_init_for_target(). However, testing symbol linkage with an extern declaration only verifies the presence of the library (.so/.a) and bypasses checking for development headers (binutils-dev). On systems where libopcodes is present without development headers installed, the probe succeeds, enabling BUILD_DISAS. Subsequent compilation of objtool then fails: fatal error: 'bfd.h' file not found 113 | #include <bfd.h> Additionally, the probe invokes $(HOSTCC) without $(HOSTCFLAGS), ignoring any sysroot or include flags specified for the host compiler. Fix this by including <bfd.h> and <dis-asm.h> directly in the test snippet, passing $(HOSTCFLAGS) so host compiler options are respected, and defining PACKAGE="objtool" to satisfy the configuration check in <bfd.h>. Fixes: 3f2de814c059 ("objtool: Fix libopcodes linking with static libraries") Fixes: 436326bc525d ("objtool: fix build failure due to missing libopcodes check") Reported-by: Alice Ryhl <aliceryhl@google.com> Assisted-by: Antigravity:Gemini-Next Signed-off-by: Ulises Mendez Martinez <umendez@google.com> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260904150710.2997558-1-umendez@google.com Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>
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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.
+