The new patches are definitely a big improvement over the previous API,
and need to go in before fallocate() goes into mainline. This last set
of changes allows the behaviour of these syscalls to accomodate the various
different semantics desired by XFS in a sensible manner instead of tying
all of the individual behaviours (time update, size update, alloc/free, etc)
into monolithic modes that will never make everyone happy.
My understanding is that you only need to grab #4 and #7 to get your tree
into get fallocate in sync with the ext4 patch queue (i.e. they are
incremental over the previous set).
Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.
-