Re: Starting a grad project that may change kernel VFS. Early research Re: Starting a grad project that may change kernel VFS. Early research

[Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>]

Jeff Shanab wrote:
> Rik van Riel wrote:
>> Hard links have been done like this in pretty much every
>> Unix filesystem since the 1970's.
[...]
> There is no real way to handle this becasue the two files look the same
> to the filesystem.

See above; it has been state of the art since the 70's.  With hardlinks
or symlinks, a graph which represents the FS happens to contain loops.
No rocket science involved.

[...]
> How would I display this information usefully to the user.

Certain file managers display the overall size and the size on disk.
The latter differs from the former due to
  - on-disk format overhead,
  - on-disk compression,
  - hardlinks and symlinks.
If the user copies the directory to another filesystem, the size on disk
will generally change.
-- 
Stefan Richter
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http://arcgraph.de/sr/