• Contact: tech-kern
• Duration estimate: 1-2 months

The fallocate/posix_fallocate system call, and the file-system-level VOP_FALLOCATE operation backing it, allow preallocating underlying storage for files before writing into them.

This is useful for improving the physical layout of files that are written in arbitrary order, such as files downloaded by bittorrent; it also allows failing up front if disk space runs out while saving a file.

This functionality is not currently implemented for FFS; implement it. (For regular files.) There is not much to this besides running the existing block allocation logic in a loop. (Note though that as the loop might take a while for large allocations, it's important to check for signals periodically to allow the operation to be interrupted.)