POSIX allocation function....

[Daniel Phillips]

On Saturday 30 July 2005 04:13, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 04:11:00AM +1000, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > On Saturday 30 July 2005 02:51, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > > OOh - lookee here !
> > >
> > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/posix_falloca
> > >te.h tml
> > >
> > > Finally a way to do this. It's not implemented on Linux (and probably
> > > all other systems of course :-) but it's finally the "posix" way to
> > > do allocation.
> >
> > Naturally it would be too much to expect a Posix deallocation interface
> > to arrive at the same time...
>
> I thought that was ftruncate ? :-)

The existing ftruncate does not take a len argument.  The purpose of a 
deallocate dual to fallocate would be to allow an application to turn a 
continuous file (back) into a sparse file.

It might be a stretch to slip a deallocate function into the "real time" 
category, but actually, it is already borderline bogus to call fallocate a 
real time function.  It has obvious real time benefits but surely has other 
applications as well.

Regards,

Daniel