From: Christian Brauner Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2026 08:26:59 +0000 (+0100) Subject: Merge patch series "vfs: change inode->i_ino from unsigned long to u64" X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=2cd400974c10c2e1169683c1bffbf477bb220160;p=thirdparty%2Fkernel%2Flinux.git Merge patch series "vfs: change inode->i_ino from unsigned long to u64" Jeff Layton says: Christian said [1] to "just do it" when I proposed this, so here we are! For historical reasons, the inode->i_ino field is an unsigned long, which means that it's 32 bits on 32 bit architectures. This has caused a number of filesystems to implement hacks to hash a 64-bit identifier into a 32-bit field, and deprives us of a universal identifier field for an inode. This patchset changes the inode->i_ino field from an unsigned long to a u64. This shouldn't make any material difference on 64-bit hosts, but 32-bit hosts will see struct inode grow by at least 4 bytes. This could have effects on slabcache sizes and field alignment. The bulk of the changes are to format strings and tracepoints, since the kernel itself doesn't care that much about the i_ino field. The first patch changes some vfs function arguments, so check that one out carefully. With this change, we may be able to shrink some inode structures. For instance, struct nfs_inode has a fileid field that holds the 64-bit inode number. With this set of changes, that field could be eliminated. I'd rather leave that sort of cleanups for later just to keep this simple. [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20260219-portrait-winkt-959070cee42f@brauner/ * patches from https://patch.msgid.link/20260304-iino-u64-v3-0-2257ad83d372@kernel.org: treewide: change inode->i_ino from unsigned long to u64 nilfs2: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 f2fs: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 ext4: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 zonefs: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 hugetlbfs: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 ext2: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 cachefiles: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 vfs: widen trace event i_ino fields to u64 net: change sock.sk_ino and sock_i_ino() to u64 audit: widen ino fields to u64 vfs: widen inode hash/lookup functions to u64 Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260304-iino-u64-v3-0-2257ad83d372@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner --- 2cd400974c10c2e1169683c1bffbf477bb220160