external bitmaps on block devices?

Is there any specific reason to require the external bitmap to be on
a file? Currently the code requires regular files to call bmap on them,
which is a fairly dangerous thing to start with. But why don't we just
allow using block devices to store the bitmap directly?
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Re: external bitmaps on block devices?

On Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:51:55 -0400 Christoph Hellwig
wrote:

> Is there any specific reason to require the external bitmap to be on
> a file? Currently the code requires regular files to call bmap on them,
> which is a fairly dangerous thing to start with. But why don't we just
> allow using block devices to store the bitmap directly?

No, no specific reason.
The original requirement was for storage in a file so that is that was
focused on.
I can see no reason not to add support for storing directly to a block device.

NeilBrown
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