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About extent attributes

The Veritas File System (VxFS) allocates disk space to files in groups of one or more adjacent blocks called extents. VxFS defines an application interface that allows programs to control various aspects of the extent allocation for a given file. The extent allocation policies associated with a file are referred to as extent attributes.

The VxFS getext and setext commands let you view or manipulate file extent attributes. In addition, the vxdump, vxrestore, mv, cp, and cpio commands preserve extent attributes when a file is backed up, moved, copied, or archived.

The two basic extent attributes associated with a file are its reservation and its fixed extent size. You can preallocate space to the file by manipulating a file's reservation, or override the default allocation policy of the file system by setting a fixed extent size.

Other policies determine the way these attributes are expressed during the allocation process.

You can specify the following attribute properties:

Some of the extent attributes are persistent and become part of the on-disk information about the file, while other attributes are temporary and are lost after the file is closed or the system is rebooted. The persistent attributes are similar to the file's permissions and are written in the inode for the file. When a file is copied, moved, or archived, only the persistent attributes of the source file are preserved in the new file.

See Other controls.

In general, the user will only set extent attributes for reservation. Many of the attributes are designed for applications that are tuned to a particular pattern of I/O or disk alignment.

See the mkfs_vxfs(1M) manual page.

See VxFS I/O interface.