Chris Mason <chris.mason@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Please keep in mind this is only a limit on the number of links to a > single file where the links and the file are all in the same directory. For the record, the nnmaildir mail backend in Gnus (an Emacs package for reading news and email) creates multiple hardlinks to the same file in the same directory. I had several thousands hardlinks at one time. Gnus/nnmaildir uses hardlinks to keep track of attributes of email messages. For example, to denote that the email stored in file FOO has been read, nnmaildir creates a link called marks/read/FOO, linking to an empty file. The rationale for this mechanism is that 1) you don't want to modify the email message itself; 2) storing marks in separate files allows concurrent accesses to the mail spool without locking; and 3) using a hardlink rather than a new empty file saves an inode. I am not saying that what Gnus does is particularly smart, but this is an example of a real world application that may break under btrfs. Regards, Matteo Frigo -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
