EXT4 Getting Faster Case-Insensitive Performance

[microcode]

If an application wants to open "myAppSettings.dat", how can it know that the file "MyAPPseTTings.DAT" exists? Only the file system driver can do the case-insensitive search of particular directorie's file name list.

opendir, readdir

[Weasel]

[...] is a complete mess... For example in Unicode [...]

Unicode is a complete mess itself and shouldn't have existed. If they all forced English upon every computer user in existence by banning any Unicode idea, we wouldn't have to deal with this garbage in the first place.

[Weasel]

Umm.. No?
You can put it in an application. You list all entries in a path and do a case insensitive search for a file name before you open it.
It's absolutely trivial.

And absolutely slow, Wine is proof of that (on case-sensitive filesystems).

It's exactly what the kernel will have to do if you do a camelcase name open in a case insensitive mountpoint.

Actually no, because the filesystem hashes the filenames so it can do a faster lookup. Not to mention that there's no pointless context switching done because the filesystem driver will do it by itself. Whereas enumerating involves many syscalls...

[qsniyg]

Personally I'm against case insensitivity for regular OS usage, and I think case sensitivity was a mistake for many reasons (performance, bugs with applications caching directory listings, etc.).

But for wine, and running applications that interact with wine prefixes? This is amazing. Wine's implementation for case insensitivity is accurate, but incredibly slow (for example, no cache). This isn't really their fault, and more just a fact that this isn't available in the kernel. Because of this, many applications run under wine (especially modded Skyrim/Fallout etc.) are just incredibly slow, especially on HDDs. Not to mention that modding games manually is incredibly frustrating due to mods using different casings for directories. This is honestly a game changer for me (pardon the pun).

[pmorph]

I don't know why, but case insensitivity under linux makes me feel all sticky and filthy. Not a feature for me, that's for sure.

[carewolf]

BecauseILikeToKnowWhereEachWordBegins and_i_dont_like_typing_underscores and-the-minuses-can-be-confused-with-options.
and i dont like holding the shift key at all and rememberring what is the correct case.

And I expect automatic completition to be able to work on case-insensitive basis.

Wait, what are you talking about? Do you now want autocompletion in the kernel? Auto-completion is an application or framework feature, and funny enough, it works EXACTLY like case-insensitive file handling would be done user-side, by enumerating all files and indexing them.

It sounds like what you want, is completely unrelated to this kernel feature, but just an application feature, that good applications already have. Even my shell (zsh), does what you want when press tab. So maybe what you want is a better shell? I can recommend zsh, but I hear fish is the new cool thing that is even better, but I haven't tried it out yet.

[RomuloP]

is that bad?

I mean he isn't saying this feature shouldn't exist.

It has nothing to do with "bad" or "good"... Being case-sensitive was just the correct thing to do, case-sensitiveness was just the path toward the less complex implementation taking the fact case conversion is a complete mess... For example in Unicode, changing case in strings can change string length, also you do not have a elegant and precise way to convert things like bit flipping and so you get all sort of ugly conversions, tables and so on that for Unicode change in each version.

Thankfully it is optional and not default as I have my doubts it will be much solid until some extra maturation of this patch but honestly filename spoofing is still a thing today in case-insensitive OSes what can make working precisely with complex directories a headache.

But sure everybody has its own right way of doing things, and I have nothing against it at last while the default is case-sensitiveness.

[starshipeleven]

Some people like only those features which benefit them, but despise all features which benefit other people.

is that bad?

I mean he isn't saying this feature shouldn't exist.

[KellyClowers]

vomit_emoji.jpg

[chroma]

I don't understand what was wrong with case sensitivity. Removing it seems like a feature regression. If one does not want to think about case, why not simply use lowercase letters exclusively when naming files? Why make it about the system in a way that potentially impacts long-established features and eventually portability between systems? Wouldn't operator flexibility and adaptation to the native and long-established *NIX culture have been easier for everyone?