On 07.06.2009 01:58, Marcel Witte wrote: So ext4 seems to be perfect for a video-partition, but to make it more perfect, it would be nice if VDR could use the fallocate()-systemcall as mentioned in the article. This would prevent fragmentation in the file
system.
Udo wrote: Sounds like a good plan, but unfortunately fallocate requires you to know
in
advance how big a file will be. This is not true for VDR recordings. And if you fallocate with too small or too big sizes, you'll end up with
fragmentation
or smaller chunks of unused space again. (All in all, this is probably only important for concurrent recordings anyway.)
Well you can predict file size for certain extent. As VDR has the split recording option built in. That is the maximum filesize.
- If you have 1h10min timer. - Allocate 1st file upto split size - Calculate average BW at the same time you are recording - You could even store this - If file is too small, allocate new file for remaining time with average BW + overhead
If you have 10min timer (or short timer which will cause filesize under split size) - if you store average BW what channels are having you could allocate directly estimated size
Naturally this is not 100% accurate, and would cause some big size fragmentation.
For EXT4 it would be nice: - fallocate(4GB) - open file for write - close file after 3GB - automatic fdeallocate(1GB)