From a9ed3aa9b87ee41e8ab3ff471b1331c154767e45 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Dave Airlie Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2026 07:57:59 +1000 Subject: Merge tag 'drm-misc-fixes-2026-09-24' of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/misc/kernel into drm-fixes A number of fixes: - bridge: - samsung-dsim: fix GPIO lifetime - client: Null pointer dereference fix - imagination: error handling fix, page handling fix - nouveau: fix reference leaks, double-frees, out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-frees, don't reject config without SCDC, a number of workarounds - virtio: fix memory leak, reference leaks, null pointer dereference, add pixel blend mode, cache coherency fix Signed-off-by: Dave Airlie From: Maxime Ripard Link: https://patch.msgid.link/arU22zzqUGDEco1y@houat --- Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst | 34 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 34 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst') diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000..976a180b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +.. 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. + -- cgit v1.3.1