The following patches reduce the size of the VFS inode structure by 28 bytes
on a UP x86. (It would be more on an x86_64 system). This is a 10% reduction
in the inode size on a UP kernel that is configured in a production mode
(i.e., with no spinlock or other debugging functions enabled; if you want to
save memory taken up by in-core inodes, the first thing you should do is
disable the debugging options; they are responsible for a huge amount of bloat
in the VFS inode structure).
This patch:
The filesystem or device-specific pointer in the inode is inside a union,
which is pretty pointless given that all 30+ users of this field have been
using the void pointer. Get rid of the union and rename it to i_private, with
a comment to explain who is allowed to use the void pointer. This is just a
cleanup, but it allows us to reuse the union 'u' for something something where
the union will actually be used.
[judith@osdl.org: powerpc build fix]
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Judith Lebzelter <judith@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Theodore Ts'o