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The inum structure used throughout GFS2 has two fields. One
no_addr is the disk block number of the inode in question and
is used everywhere as the inode number. The other, no_formal_ino,
is used only as the generation number for NFS.

Historically the no_formal_ino field was set using a complicated
system of one global and one per-node file containing inode numbers
in order to ensure that each no_formal_ino was unique. Also this
code made no provision for what would happen when eventually the
(64 bit) numbers ran out. Now I know that is pretty unlikely to
happen given the large space of numbers, but it is possible
nevertheless.

The only guarantee required for no_formal_ino is that, for any
single inode, the same number doesn't get reused too quickly.

We already have a generation number which is kept in the inode
and initialised from a counter in the resource group (almost
no overhead, since we have to touch the resource group anyway
in order to allocate an ino...