On Tue, Mar 23, 1999 at 05:28:57PM -0500, Ted Lemon wrote:
> 
> > I guess you could always just allocate another i-node and store that
> > other i-node number in the opaque data field, effectively making it
> > 'unlimited.'
> 
> Since i-nodes aren't named objects (that is, you can't get at them
> directly from userland), this would require changes to the filesystem.
> But in theory I think that's not a completely unreasonable idea.

I did an open-by-inode system call to speed up a news server once.  It was
very effective. (IIRC I also did stat-by-inode).

Unfortunately I don't know what became of the code; I don't seem to have it
around here anywhere... sigh.