ext2fs status report 8 & 9

[Aditya Sarawgi]

Hi,

ext2fs is now completely GPL free :) and I have started with 
benchmarking. Initial results show that the new implementation is slower 
than the GPL'd one. This was expected as I had removed preallocation 
from ext2fs due to the fact that preallocation code was GPL'd and was 
not compatible with journaling. Linux now uses a different kind of 
preallocation, it is known as reservation window. I am trying a few 
things to improve its performance. Firstly opensolaris has implemented 
some kind of preallocation which is compatible with journaling and is 
GPL free, so I'm working with them to get that into ext2fs of FreeBSD. 
I haven't gone through source code of ext2fs in opensolaris as it is 
under CDDL. I have told them to share their ideas on this or release the 
code under BSD license so that I can implement it in FreeBSD. If this 
works out as expected then the performance of ext2fs will increase to 
some extent. I am also evaluating the possibility of implementing 
cluster_write for ext2fs (Suggested by: Pedro Giffuni). When Godmar Back 
ported it the block size of ext2fs was pretty small so he experienced a 
performance hit with cluster_write but now ext2fs uses larger block 
sizes so this might improve the performance of it. 

Cheers,

Aditya Sarawgi