This patch is in response of the following post: http://lwn.net/Articles/556136/ "ext4: introduce two new ioctls" Dave chinner suggested that truncate_block_range (which was one of the ioctls name) should be a fallocate operation and not any fs specific ioctl, hence we add this functionality to new flags of fallocate. This new functionality of collapsing range could be used by media editing tools which does non linear editing to quickly purge and edit parts of a media file. This will immensely improve the performance of these operations. The limitation of fs block size aligned offsets can be easily handled by media codecs which are encapsulated in a conatiner as they have to just change the offset to next keyframe value to match the proper alignment.
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| @@ -5,5 +5,26 @@ · 4 unmodified lines | |||
| 5 | #define FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE 0x02 /* de-allocates range */ | 5 | #define FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE 0x02 /* de-allocates range */ |
| 6 | #define FALLOC_FL_NO_HIDE_STALE 0x04 /* reserved codepoint */ | 6 | #define FALLOC_FL_NO_HIDE_STALE 0x04 /* reserved codepoint */ |
| 7 | 7 | ||
| 8 | /* | ||
| 9 | * FALLOC_FL_COLLAPSE_RANGE is used to remove a range of a file | ||
| 10 | * without leaving a hole in the file. The contents of the file beyond | ||
| 11 | * the range being removed is appended to the start offset of the range | ||
| 12 | * being removed (i.e. the hole that was punched is "collapsed"), | ||
| 13 | * resulting in a file layout that looks like the range that was | ||
| 14 | * removed never existed. As such collapsing a range of a file changes | ||
| 15 | * the size of the file, reducing it by the same length of the range | ||
| 16 | * that has been removed by the operation. | ||
| 17 | * | ||
| 18 | * Different filesystems may implement different limitations on the | ||
| 19 | * granularity of the operation. Most will limit operations to | ||
| 20 | * filesystem block size boundaries, but this boundary may be larger or | ||
| 21 | * smaller depending on the filesystem and/or the configuration of the | ||
| 22 | * filesystem or file. | ||
| 23 | * | ||
| 24 | * Attempting to collapse a range that crosses the end of the file is | ||
| 25 | * considered an illegal operation - just use ftruncate(2) if you need | ||
| 26 | * to collapse a range that crosses EOF. | ||
| 27 | */ | ||
| 28 | #define FALLOC_FL_COLLAPSE_RANGE 0x08 | ||
| 8 | 29 | ||
| 9 | #endif /* _UAPI_FALLOC_H_ */ | 30 | #endif /* _UAPI_FALLOC_H_ */ |