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authorHaojie Li <lihaojie@kylinos.cn>2026-08-25 18:08:45 +0800
committerChun-Kuang Hu <chunkuang.hu@kernel.org>2026-09-28 23:20:55 +0000
commitbce7698e2e6565bb765bd0522337f29f5f312624 (patch)
tree0b735b7b4a27369cb4d75d9431b3ee59ce7e5bcc /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
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drm/mediatek: Add missing IS_ERR check for ovl_adaptor platform devicegrafted
platform_device_register_data() can fail and return an ERR_PTR, but the return value is used without checking, leading to an invalid pointer being stored in ddp_comp[].dev and passed to component_match_add() and mtk_ddp_comp_init(), which could result in a kernel crash. Add an IS_ERR() check to jump to the error handling path on failure. Fixes: 0d9eee9118b7 ("drm/mediatek: Add drm ovl_adaptor sub driver for MT8195") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Haojie Li <lihaojie@kylinos.cn> Reviewed-by: CK Hu <ck.hu@mediatek.com> Link: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mediatek/patch/20260825100845.438893-1-lihaojie@kylinos.cn/ Signed-off-by: Chun-Kuang Hu <chunkuang.hu@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.
+