Bug 133429

Summary: EXT3: Enable dir_index feature
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0 Reporter: Jens Siebert <jsiebert>
Component: YaST2Assignee: Andreas Jaeger <aj>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity: Enhancement    
Priority: P5 - None CC: adrian.schroeter
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: SuSE Linux 10.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Jens Siebert 2005-11-11 10:45:55 UTC 
ext3 has a feature called 'dir_index' which enables faster lookups in large filesystems by using a technique called hashed b-trees. Currently a user which wants to use this feature has to manually convert the filesystem by using 'tune2fs -O dir_index <device>' and 'fsck.ext3 -fD <device>' which takes a long time to complete on large filesystems. This feature can also be enabled by using 'mkfs.ext3 -O dir_index <device>' at filesystem creation time. The YAST2 installer doesn't offer an option for this.

My suggestion is to add an option to the YAST2 installer to enable the dir_index feature at filesystem creation time. I've tested this option on three different system and noticed some speedups especially on slower systems (my notebook).
Comment 1 Michael Gross 2005-11-11 13:09:08 UTC 
Thomas: Has it a special reason that this feature cannot be enabled that way? I also took Chris into CC, maby he wants to provide a comment here.
Comment 2 Chris L Mason 2005-11-11 13:18:00 UTC 
dir_index is generally considered stable.  It would be a good feature to add to yast.
Comment 3 Thomas Fehr 2005-11-11 14:06:57 UTC 
New features are for PM to decide.
Comment 4 Andreas Jaeger 2006-01-04 09:56:14 UTC 
Added as feature to our feature database, this will now get evaluated for SUSE Linux 10.2.

I mark it as solved since it's tracked elsewhere.
Comment 5 Jens Siebert 2006-06-20 11:56:57 UTC 
FYI: The latest e2fsprogs (1.39) enables this functionality by default.

--
Mke2fs will now create filesystems hash trees and on-line resizing
enabled by default, based on the new /etc/mke2fs.conf file.
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http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=2406&release_id=420906