holes in files

[Paul Gillingwater]

In article <11753 at alice.att.com> andrew at alice.att.com (Andrew Hume) writes:
> 	i am on the ansi committee working on worm fs standards and
> the problem of reserving space on worms is understood and provided for.
> It is a little moot how you can do it with vanilla unix but at the file
> system driver level, you can allocate arbitrary (well, limited by 2^64 bytes
> and the world's production of media) extents for future use. presumably
> clever vendors will add ioctl's or fcntl's to do such.

For a very good discussion on these matters, go along to your local
HP office, and ask for a copy of the HP Journal.  The latest edition
goes into great detail about their new Optical R/W auto-changer
(juke box) and has an excellent discussion on how they implemented
things under a UNIX (HP-UX McKusick) file system.

-- 
Paul Gillingwater, paul at actrix.gen.nz