On 9/19/22 12:29 AM, Tim via users wrote:
On Sun, 2022-09-18 at 21:44 -0500, Robert Nichols wrote:
With a symlink, that "data" is the string that shows as the symlink target. The advantage over a tiny file is that if the string is short enough to fit within the inode structure, no data block on the disk needs to be allocated. That's faster and more efficient than creating a file since the inode needs to be set up and written in any case. systemd is far from the first program to take advantage of this.
Interesting. What about the old running out of inodes on a disc problem? How did they handle that?
The symlink is using _one_ inode, which is also the number that would be needed for that tiny file. Creating lots of tiny files will also cause the filesystem to run out of inodes long before it runs out of data blocks.