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  • Theodore Ts'o's avatar
    ext4: Calculate metadata requirements more accurately · 9d0be502
    Theodore Ts'o authored
    In the past, ext4_calc_metadata_amount(), and its sub-functions
    ext4_ext_calc_metadata_amount() and ext4_indirect_calc_metadata_amount()
    badly over-estimated the number of metadata blocks that might be
    required for delayed allocation blocks.  This didn't matter as much
    when functions which managed the reserved metadata blocks were more
    aggressive about dropping reserved metadata blocks as delayed
    allocation blocks were written, but unfortunately they were too
    aggressive.  This was fixed in commit 0637c6f4
    
    , but as a result the
    over-estimation by ext4_calc_metadata_amount() would lead to reserving
    2-3 times the number of pending delayed allocation blocks as
    potentially required metadata blocks.  So if there are 1 megabytes of
    blocks which have been not yet been allocation, up to 3 megabytes of
    space would get reserved out of the user's quota and from the file
    system free space pool until all of the inode's data blocks have been
    allocated.
    
    This commit addresses this problem by much more accurately estimating
    the number of metadata blocks that will be required.  It will still
    somewhat over-estimate the number of blocks needed, since it must make
    a worst case estimate not knowing which physical blocks will be
    needed, but it is much more accurate than before.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatar"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
    9d0be502