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authorKees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>2026-09-02 15:31:14 -0700
committerKees Cook <kees@kernel.org>2026-09-04 21:37:00 -0700
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treec65086f9bdcd48c6360fb7cb4598bca084da1f32 /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/inlinedata.rst
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treewide: refresh kmalloc_obj() conversionsgrafted
This is another run of the Coccinelle script for converting kmalloc() family of allocations to kmalloc_obj() via the existing rules in scripts/coccinelle/api/kmalloc_objs.cocci This catches both the set of kmalloc() uses added since the first kmalloc_obj() conversions in v7.0 and adds a large group missed in the first pass due to Coccinelle not interacting well with the cleanup.h scoped_...() family of macros[1]. I worked around this with spatch's "--macro-file" argument to a file with all the scoped_...() macros mapped to Coccinelle's YACFE_ITERATOR[2] as that was the closest viable control flow indicator I could find. Build tested allmodconfig on x86, arm64, arm, loongarch, mips, powerpc, riscv, and s390 with no new warnings. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/202609021314.8A9C0B8@keescook/ [1] Link: https://github.com/coccinelle/coccinelle/blob/master/standard.h [2] Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+Inline Data
+-----------
+
+The inline data feature was designed to handle the case that a file's
+data is so tiny that it readily fits inside the inode, which
+(theoretically) reduces disk block consumption and reduces seeks. If the
+file is smaller than 60 bytes, then the data are stored inline in
+``inode.i_block``. If the rest of the file would fit inside the extended
+attribute space, then it might be found as an extended attribute
+“system.data” within the inode body (“ibody EA”). This of course
+constrains the amount of extended attributes one can attach to an inode.
+If the data size increases beyond i_block + ibody EA, a regular block
+is allocated and the contents moved to that block.
+
+Pending a change to compact the extended attribute key used to store
+inline data, one ought to be able to store 160 bytes of data in a
+256-byte inode (as of June 2015, when i_extra_isize is 28). Prior to
+that, the limit was 156 bytes due to inefficient use of inode space.
+
+The inline data feature requires the presence of an extended attribute
+for “system.data”, even if the attribute value is zero length.
+
+Inline Directories
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The first four bytes of i_block are the inode number of the parent
+directory. Following that is a 56-byte space for an array of directory
+entries; see ``struct ext4_dir_entry``. If there is a “system.data”
+attribute in the inode body, the EA value is an array of
+``struct ext4_dir_entry`` as well. Note that for inline directories, the
+i_block and EA space are treated as separate dirent blocks; directory
+entries cannot span the two.
+
+Inline directory entries are not checksummed, as the inode checksum
+should protect all inline data contents.