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authorSven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com>2026-09-09 11:29:53 +0200
committerMasami Hiramatsu (Google) <mhiramat@kernel.org>2026-09-10 08:43:35 +0900
commitd22c3e0088e85be8131f7a9283f759cdbb20726d (patch)
tree9668df2aa27b26f850d3ba5ba1287e443803675c /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst
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selftests/ftrace: Fix unique symbol check in kprobe_non_uniq_symbol.tcgrafted
The current regex also matches symbols in modules, which makes the test fail on s390 where name_show is present only once in the kernel, but also multiple times in modules: 000001b1401cdc20 t name_show 000001b0c05e6c40 t name_show [mdev] 000001b0c0495f30 t name_show [i2c_core] Fix this by changing the regular expression to only match the function name. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260909092954.2200558-1-svens@linux.ibm.com/ Fixes: 03b80ff8023a ("selftests/ftrace: Add new test case which checks non unique symbol") Signed-off-by: Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Signed-off-by: Masami Hiramatsu (Google) <mhiramat@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.
+