"Here's a set of patches that remove all calls to iget() and all read_inode() functions," began David Howells describing a collection of 32 patches posted to the lkml. He went on to explain the reason for removing these functions, "they should be removed for two reasons: firstly they don't lend themselves to good error handling, and secondly their presence is a temptation for code outside a filesystem to call iget() to access inodes within that filesystem." He then suggested three benefits:

"(1) Error handling gets simpler as you can return an error code rather than having to call is_bad_inode(). (2) You can now tell the difference between ENOMEM and EIO occurring in the read_inode() path. (3) The code should get smaller. iget() is an inline function that is typically called 2-3 times per filesystem that uses it. By folding the iget code into the read_inode code for each filesystem, it eliminates some duplication."

"I've just released the 2.6.23-rc9-ext4-1. It collapses some patches in preparation for pushing them to Linus, and adds some of the cleanup patches that had been incorporated into Andrew's broken-out-2007-10-01-04-09 series," announced Theodore Ts'o. He also noted of the current ext4 git tree, "it also has some new development patches in the unstable (not yet ready to push to mainline) portion of the patch series." In an earlier thread Theodore posted a series of patches specifically intended for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. Included in the patch series was a patch for improving fsck performance, "in performance tests testing e2fsck time, we have seen that e2fsck time on ext3 grows linearly with the total number of inodes in the filesytem. In ext4 with the uninitialized block groups feature, the e2fsck time is constant, based solely on the number of used inodes rather than the total inode count." The patch included an explanation of how the feature works, enabled through a mkfs option:

"With this feature, there is a a high water mark of used inodes for each block group. Block and inode bitmaps can be uninitialized on disk via a flag in the group descriptor to avoid reading or scanning them at e2fsck time. A checksum of each group descriptor is used to ensure that corruption in the group descriptor's bit flags does not cause incorrect operation."

"In [the first pass] of e2fsck, every inode table in the fileystem is scanned and checked, regardless of whether it is in use," Avantika Mathur began. "This is the most time consuming part of the filesystem check. The unintialized block group feature can greatly reduce e2fsck time by eliminating checking of uninitialized inodes." She went on to explain how it works, "with this feature, there is a a high water mark of used inodes for each block group. Block and inode bitmaps can be uninitialized on disk via a flag in the group descriptor to avoid reading or scanning them at e2fsck time. A checksum of each group descriptor is used to ensure that corruption in the group descriptor's bit flags does not cause incorrect operation." Avantika attached a graph illustrating the advantage of the patch which she summarized as follows:

"The patches have been stress tested with fsstress and fsx. In performance tests testing e2fsck time, we have seen that e2fsck time on ext3 grows linearly with the total number of inodes in the filesytem. In ext4 with the uninitialized block groups feature, the e2fsck time is constant, based solely on the number of used inodes rather than the total inode count. Since typical ext4 filesystems only use 1-10% of their inodes, this feature can greatly reduce e2fsck time for users. With performance improvement of 2-20 times, depending on how full the filesystem is."