ocfs2: Support for inline-data

The following patches give ocfs2 the ability to put inode data inside free space in an inode block. This makes sense since ocfs2 inodes are so large (between 512 bytes and 4k). Aside from space considerations, this should provide a speedup on workloads which read lots of small files and directories. I hope to have some benchmark data soon.

A design document describing this feature in detail can be found at:

http://oss.oracle.com/osswiki/OCFS2/DesignDocs/DataInInode

The patches are split up into several sections. The 1st 10 patches simply clean up some Ocfs2 code, especially in the area of directory manipulation. Doing this up front helped to keep the inline-data patches cleaner and more obvious.

The inline-data patches comprise the final five patches of the series and are split up into seperate read and write support patches for files and directories.

Alternatively, this series is also available via git in the 'inline-data' branch of ocfs2.git.

	--Mark

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Mark Fasheh
Senior Software Developer, Oracle
[email protected]