Hi,
I am doing a project in EXT4 ,and I am facing one problem..

1)When I am creating a new file and writing into it through cat/echo, the functions(ext4_mb_new_blocks) of mballoc are not getting called,so I am not able to get the required physical block number..

However when doing the same with vim/gedit or even when overwriting the file with cat/echo the functions are getting called and I am able to get the required physical block number and when verifying it with blkcat the data gets printed properly...

Please help with this issue...

What happends when you write a small program yurself that just runs open(), write() and close() ?
Also, what command exactly you use with cat/echo?

My aim is to get the phy block number for the new file...
I have just written a simple prog say hello world in a.txt..
And I am running the command:
cat a.txt > b.txt
above command I am executing when b.txt is not there.

Now if b.txt has some data already ,then only I am able to get the phy. blk number of b.txt(by executing the abv command), otherwise not.

When you run the commandthe shell creates the empty file b.txt. Since nothing has yet been written to the file, no physical blocks have yet been allocated.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ok b.txt is treated as a empty file, but since a.txt has some data, we are actually writing the data of a.txt to b.txt...so we should get the block number for b.txt???

Yes, it certainly should. Sorry, but it is not clear exactly when and how you are trying to get the block number for b.txt.

We are trying to get the phy block number of b.txt through ext4_mb_new_blocks() in mballoc.c where actually you get the starting phy block number..we were getting phy blk no. when we are overwriting in b.txt through cat...
Now we are using vim since we were getting problem through cat...
Do you know the name of the buffer that vim uses ?..I want to edit its buffer size, since it is by default set to 8192 bytes..I am using Fedora 14...

If you are checking during the write() call, it sounds like you are experiencing ext4 delayed allocation.

I've never looked into the internals of vim. Sorry.