[erlang-questions] fallocate(FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE) / lseek(SEEK_HOLE / SEEK_DATA) anytime soon ?

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 20/11/2012, at 9:28 PM, Bernard Fouché wrote:
>>> Is there any chance that the API support these features in a reasonable time?
>> Out of three operating systems immediately available to me,
>> two (Solaris, Mac OS X) do not have fallocate, and one (three different
>> versions of Linux that I am counting as one) does have fallocate() but
>> insists that it has only an FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE flag.
> man 2 fallocate reports the same for me on Fedora 17 however FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE is listed in /usr/include/linux/falloc.h . I guess the man page is obsolete since kernel 2.6.38: http://man7.org/tlpi/api_changes/index.html#Linux-2.6.38 . It seems that Solaris has fcntl(F_FREESP) which provides the same feature. I can't tell about Mac OS X. The feature is available in more and more fs (zfs, xfs, etx4, btrfs and others).

I maintain a file comparing the APIs of
	Single Unix Specification version 3
	Single Unix Specification version 4
	Mac OS X (10.5 and 10.6; I don't have anything later at the moment)
	Linux
	Solaris (was Solaris 10, is now Solaris 11)
	HP-UX 11i (have manuals, not system)
	OpenBSD 4.7 (I really must upgrade this some time)
	Cygwin
	AIX (have manuals, not system; just begun on this one).
because I'm trying to develop portable-to-POSIX-ish code.
It's a huge amount of labour and really needs to be automated in some way.

Out of that list, F_FREESP and F_FREESP64 are only available in Solaris.
The Solaris documentation says

	 Free storage space associated  with  a  section  of  the
         ordinary  file  fildes.  The  section  is specified by a
         variable of data type struct flock pointed  to  by  arg.
         The  data  type struct flock is defined in the <fcntl.h>
         header (see fcntl.h(3HEAD)) and is described below. Note
         that  all  file  systems  might not support all possible
         variations of F_FREESP arguments.  In  particular,  many
         file  systems allow space to be freed only at the end of
         a file.

It is not obvious to me why Linux didn't copy the Solaris interface.

Freeing space at the end of a file can of course be done with
{,f}truncate().

Of course more recent versions of various operating systems may have
all sorts of goodies.  I'm trying to avoid the bleeding edge.