On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Simon Burge wrote:

> Ross Harvey wrote:
> 
> > I can think of more things: increasing NDADDR, for one. It's only 12 right
> > now. Perhaps there is no point in this one idea, but that's the reason for
> > the open development review.
> 
> Another thing is storage of small files in the inode itself, ala short
> symlinks.  Not much of a win with the size inodes we have now, but
> with larger inodes and an unused opaque area...  Migration to and from
> inode-containered files might be fun :)  Hmm, thinking about this more,
> maybe there's not much that is small enough.  Pid files and lock
> files come to mind, but not much else.
> 
> I'm sure the list could go on, and on, and ...

That's why the extra space has a flags field. :-) If you want to use that
96-bytes of space for something else, then you have space to indicate that
use. All you have to do is just tell ffs to not allow storing of opaque
data on top of it. No big loss as I don't see as symlinks are supposed to
just point somewhere else - they aren't real files. :-)

Take care,

Bill